[Infrastructures] fai vs. ZENworks vs. m23

[Todd Snyder]

If you go with Zenworks (which we're also looking at doing), I believe
you need to use eDirectory (or link in with AD) which will probably mess
with your LDAP Authentication.

I'd suggest talking to Novell directly, talk to a sales drone or an SE
and see what they have to say about implementing Zenworks in an existing
environment.  We haven't gotten to that level of detail with them yet,
so I can't help you.  Give me a couple weeks and we might have more
information.

Other than the constant harassment that happens after you talk to the
sales drone, theres really nothing to lose.

Cheers.

T. 

-----Original Message-----
From: infrastructures-admin@terraluna.org
[mailto:infrastructures-admin@terraluna.org] On Behalf Of Adrian von
Bidder
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 2:52 AM
To: infrastructures@terraluna.org
Subject: [Infrastructures] fai vs. ZENworks vs. m23

Yo all!

We're (finally) ending our historically grown each-machine-is-unique 
approach to maintaining our 80 Linux PCs and looking at some management 
tools.  We're evaluating m23, zenworks and fai - any users of these
tools 
here?

fai and m23 would imply using Debian (or derivative), while ZENworks
would 
imply SuSE (we're not looking at RH)- we are confident that both are 
absolutely viable choices, and since I'm more a Debian guy, while my 
collegue has more SuSE experience we thought that we'll decide on the 
software distribution tool first and base our distribution choice on
that.

As mentioned, there are ca. 80 clients.  Some of them are on ADSL (700k,

soon 2Mbps), some of them on VDSL (12Mbps) so upgrade by re-installing 
complete images is probably not a good idea.  Also, many of these
clients 
are only powered on when people want to work, so the update process
needs 
to cope with that:
 * needs to happen in the background
 * needs to cope with being aborted a few times during download
 * needs to be client-driven, as we don't know and don't want to know
when 
each client will be powered on.  Wake on LAN might be possible except
for 
the DSL clients.

Otherwise, the environment is relatively simple.  Uniform x86 Linux 
environment, even more or less uniform hardware (wrt net, graphics 
chipsets).  The only problem will be the local printers, where we'll
need 
to properly handle all the configuration differencies. LDAP as auth 
service, $HOME on NFS, KDE partly locked down with KIOSK.

Comments?

cheers
-- vbi

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Today is Setting Orange, the 45th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3172