[Yum] deploying and maintaining linux networks howto

[Robert G. Brown]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Zouhir Hafidi wrote:

> Hi everybody,
> 
> for those who want to autoinstall with kickstart, update
> with yum, and maintain with cfengine you can take a look 
> at this howto (first draft): 
> 
> http://www-gat.univ-lille1.fr/~hafidi/deploy_and_maintain_howto/
> 
> it is a "step by step" document to:
> - create an installation tree
> - merge updates with a simple python script
> - install with kickstart
> - update with yum
> - maintain with cfengine
> 
> any feedback is welcome,

Very nice, and something that will prove very useful, no doubt, as this
is very nearly a FAQ.  This beautifully illustrates how bleeding-edge
scalable the NOW/COW cluster model (arbitrarily using this to refer to
non-Scyld- or Clustermatic-like clusters that are installed and
maintained more or less as modified workstations on a LAN rather than
with a custom kernel and global PID space) can be.  Great job!

One suggestion -- don't link specific yum (or any other) snapshots to
your howto.  Things change too fast, and the links will be "dead" in no
time, increasing the work you have to do to keep the HOWTO current.
Seth works on yum like a wild man (given that he DOES have a full time
JOB:-) and although yum stable may hang around for "a while", that may
well be a relatively short while as he continues to add "must have
features" to the development release.  There are also still bugfixes
appearing in the stable release.  I'd recommend linking to the yum
website itself:

  http://www.linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

because it has useful information on yum for 7.3, 8.0, 9.0 on it, some
addition sample configuration stuff on it, as well as links to
current-stable for all three RH versions (which alas each need their own
RPM because of the "signficant" library changes accompanying the rapid
fire releases).

There is also a bit of help on exactly the same problem (sans CFengine),
although not nearly as well organized, on:

  http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/Resources/linux-mag.php

...mostly sample configuration files for e.g. dhcp, pxe, kickstart.
Your HOWTO is much more detailed and descriptive.

Are you going to contribute this to www.tldp.org?  I'd like to link it
to both this "short term" Resources page and to my main resources page
on http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/Resources/links.php (which is getting
so full that I'm going to have to work on adding an additional layer of
organization or introducting finer grained categories:-).

  rgb

> 
> ZH
> ----------------
> Zouhir HAFIDI    
> USTL, U.F.R. de Mathematiques, Bat. M2
> F-59655 Villeneuve d'Ascq CEDEX, FRANCE
> tel (+33) 3.20.43.45.15	fax (+33) 3.20.43.43.02
> 
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> 

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu