Enterprise Management Tool supporting Fedora?

Alan Cox alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Mon Nov 12 18:33:35 UTC 2007


> > In large corporate/enterprise environments with hundreds or thousands
> > workstations and laptops a centralized management tool is a must and
> > any home-made scripting solution hacked by those two geeks working in
> > the basement is too fragile solution so something proven and tested
> > would be needed.
> All this stuff, whether corporate or Linux or even budding new OS's are
> written by 
> Geeks.  Where they work, and how much they get paid and by whom has very
> little impact
> on value.  

Some practical examples.

Early Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Products are based around the
up2date. That was written internally for enterprise purposes by Red Hat.

Fedora took the decision to also take on yum, which was written
externally (initially for Yellow Dog) and then much updated. It wasn't
many Fedora releases before yum went from "grudgingly added by community
demand" to "default", and shortly after to "also used as the base package
update technology for enterprise products"

Some of the largest networks and clusters in the world are managed by
custom, in-house developed solutions. 

Practically it is usually about two things, neither of which are about
who wrote the code

- Having proper process
	You can write it in the basement but you still need to document
it and write it to an appropriate standard, design, security policy and
with agreement from the correct people. It has to produce the correct
logs and meet the documented goals.

- Doing proper testing
	Goes without saying I would hope.

(and in some cases)

- Having a third party for support/blame/testing/..

The latter basically being an outsourcing decision to gain economies of
scale, ideally by using the same tools as others or at least harvesting
the benefits of a common pool of knowledge and expertise you don't have
to own internally.

Alan




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