Re: Network-aware rpm?

["Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery kf8nh apk net>]

On Monday, July 16, 2001 15:28:53 +0000, hanksdc@about-inc.com wrote:
+-----
| Where I work, we manage a large number of machines whose installation we
| automate with kickstart, and ensuring each box is uniform after time (and
| among 6 sysadmins) becomes quite a task. I've done some initial steps
| using snmp to be able to query a listing of 'rpm -qa' from each box, but
+--->8

Eek.  SNMP?!  I prefer something with a bit more security....

We have a machine database, and programs "grsh" (which uses Kerberized rsh) 
and "gssh" (which uses ssh) to run programs on machines in the database; 
one can pass them database selection arguments to run on a subset of 
machines.  Since they use rsh/ssh, they can pass arguments; and since both 
rsh and ssh are Kerberos-enabled and all machines are configured with root 
.klogin/.k5login files, an administrator can easily do things like this.

For checking consistency I'd get a list from one machine, sort it, stick it 
in AFS (you could use NFS instead), and gssh a shell script which did "rpm 
-qa | sort | comm -2 - /afs/.../master-list" to show only added/missing 
rpms.  A fancier script could use that to remove extra RPMs and install 
missing ones from the install server automatically.

--
brandon s. allbery  [os/2][linux][solaris][freebsd]   allbery@kf8nh.apk.net
system administrator   [JAPH][WAY too many hats]        allbery@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering                                   KF8NH
carnegie mellon university     [linux: proof of the million monkeys theory]