[Yum] Something like pkgsync for yum?

Jonathan Manton jmanton at uiuc.edu
Thu Aug 16 19:37:17 UTC 2007


Hi.  I maintain a network of ~80 FC7 machines.  The machines are a  
mix of hardware types, but (ideally) have identical packages  
installed.  However, often a machine will deviate from the ideal for  
a variety of reasons (e.g., it was offline when the user requested  
the package).  I would like to be able to specify the packages to be  
installed in a central location, and have packages install/uninstall  
when this list changes.


My primary use case is when I have a user request a package be  
installed on all the workstations, typically something that is  
already in the Fedora "everything" repository.  I don't install  
everything by default, but there are additions that are made  
periodically.  Right now I have scripts to ssh into each machine and  
do the install.  But this breaks down when there is a machine offline  
for some reason (e.g., turned off and waiting for a Dell service rep  
to stop by).


There is a Debian package called pkgsync (http://packages.debian.org/ 
unstable/admin/pkgsync) that appears to do this for apt/dpkg.   
Pkgsync appears to allow an admin to maintain a list of "must have",  
"may have", and "may not have" packages, and have the installed  
packages on a given client periodically synchronize to this list.   
But I have found nothing similar for yum.


I know there are tools such as cfengine and puppet that could do this  
for me.  But they have a steep learning curve, and if possible I'd  
rather find a simpler way to do this.





More information about the Yum mailing list