[clug] Distributed Administration

[Daniel Pittman]

steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> writes:
> Michael Manning wrote on 24/9/09 6:46 PM:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> Two time short suggestions might be Kickstart/anacoda (Redhat based) and
>> AutoYast (OpenSuse based) for auto pre-configured installs.
>>
>> Then management, I am not sure on?

[...]

> They probably had some simple SSH script to iterate an action across all
> or a selection of hosts (DEV, TST, PRD, DB's, APP-srv, Web-srv).

Yeah.  Having been there, as well as building a system using make and rsync to
improve on that a bit, I can't recommend it; cfengine or puppet make the whole
thing easier to declare and use, without adding a lot of cost to the whole
process.

You /can/ just use them to auth machines, ship files, and run shell scripts,
and be quite happy.  Don't mistake the common efforts to do richer management
of things from the tools for being the only way.

[...]

> What do people who run large clusters/GRID computing do??

At least a few hang about here and can probably answer better than I can, but
my experience is that they usually use a "bare metal reinstall" model, and
have a good automatic-installation system.

Per-job stuff is handled separately, either through an administrative shared
file system, or through the work scheduling system.

        Daniel
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