Re: Enterprise Management Tool supporting Fedora?

On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 10:46 -0800, Daniel Qarras wrote:
Hi all,

this must have been discussed before but I can't find a clear answer
with Google so here it goes:

In large corporate/enterprise environments with hundreds or thousands
workstations and laptops a centralized management tool is a must and
any home-made scripting solution hacked by those two geeks working in
the basement is too fragile solution so something proven and tested
would be needed.
All this stuff, whether corporate or Linux or even budding new OS's are
written by
Geeks. Where they work, and how much they get paid and by whom has very
little impact
on value. Testing I will admit has value, but only if the inherent code
is worthwhile,
and that is as likely to come out of a basement (perhaps more so than
from a cubicle farm)
since the folks working on it have a vested self interest in the actual
code. To post such
a comment on a list of principally users, hackers and developers makes
you seem surprisingly
unaware of the environment here.

For RHEL there's RHN/Satellite Server (1) which probably works, for
Ubuntu there's Blueprint (2) coming, but is there anything that would
support at least a mixture of Fedora/CentOS installations and is
available free (in all meanings, ruling Satellite Server out)? Probably
something like Yum + Cfengine could be bended to do most of the work
but as said having a home made system for managing thousands of systems
doesn't sound a bright idea. And just going 100% to RHEL is not always
a solution as many developers will get benefits by using tools present
in Fedora but not in RHEL and some hardware (especially laptops) are
hard to get running without using the latest distro available.

Below is a list I imagine that would be needed, most of these are from
the Ubuntu Blueprint's requirements:

1. Automatic upgrade to a particular version of selected packages
2. Kickstart new client machine with the appropriate version of Ubuntu
(specific to a hardware configuration and role) with all the associated
packages selected by the IT department of the company
3. Ability to change configurations and rules (including firewalls et
al) centrally and push them to the client machines
3a. Ability to execute remote commands on a given set of clients
4. Monitor and record list of packages installed in a laptop or
workstation
4a. Any abnormal status reported by e-mail or others means to admins
6. Stagger the updates and upgrades so that all machines do not suck-in
bits at the same time

So if anyone has suggestions or even experiences with a tool to handle
these kinds of tasks in large environments it would very interesting to
hear about them!

There are several folks here with considerable experience in servers and
server configuration.
Many if not most use custom scripts because virtually every server setup
is unique, depending on
the legal requirements from HIPIAA, to EU regulations, to SOX, to asia
concerns, to the specific needs of China and other such countries. Thus
Server configuration, storage and storage access, record keeping and
related logging are all dependent on more than just technical issues.

Additionally it appears to me that everything you have listed is
already available in
Fedora, and given the design philosophy of Linux, custom scripting of
small tools that do one job well is
the means by which such setups are done, a kind question to some of the
"geeks in basements" might well get you help to acquire just what you
need.


1) https://www.redhat.com/rhn/
2)
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/enterprise-management-features

Regards,
Les H

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