On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Paul Stewart <paul@paulstewart.org> wrote:
Hey folks. just curious what people are using for automating updates to Linux boxes?
Today, we manually do YUM updates to all the CentOS servers . just an example but a good one. I have heard there are some open source solutions similar to that of Red Hat Network?
There's no tool I could recommend that would be very close to RHN. However, for solving the problem of keeping packages up to date and systems in a known-state, I would recommend checking out some configuration management tools. There are several popular ones nowadays, though I personally prefer Puppet or Chef. Both are tools that allow administrators to declare what a system should look like, and abstract away the hard work of making that happen on a variety of platforms. In both cases, it's possible to monitor how well those tools are working and what they're doing in the background so that you can get an idea of what's up to date and what's not. Are you just trying to solve for making sure that packages are up to date? Making sure that running daemons are also up to date? Cheers, jof