[Infrastructures] Multi-Platform Software and Patch Distribution

[Jim Rowan]

On Sunday, February 16, 2003, at 02:00 PM, Harry Hoffman wrote:

> Hi,
>   Is anyone out there basing there infrastructure from the Usenix (LISA 
> 2000)
> paper titled:
>
> "Use of Cfengine for Automated, Multi-Platform Software and Patch 
> Distribution"?

They make it way too complicated.  Get cfengine, your favorite shared 
filesystem, and depot.  Mix and match liberally.  Go at  it.
Even though you have 100s (or 1000s) of programs and 100s (or 1000s) of 
systems, unless you're operating a life-support system, you don't need the 
full theoretical level of control.  In fact, if you can deliver it, most 
places would like everything to be as close to homogenous as you can make 
it...   Eliminate the need to handle 10^x combinations! That's readily 
achievable these days.

The new cfengine (2.x) has some nice improvements in terms of managing 
autonomous systems and I recommend it even more highly.

Jim Rowan
DCSI
jmr@computing.com