Installing software on central storage

[Stéphane Di Cesare <sdicesar eso org>]

Dear all,

I have an application that must be installed on central storage, to be 
used by a number of machines. All machines are guaranteed to have the 
same architecture.
The configuration for this application depends on the role of the 
machine, and is located on a specific directory for each (but still on 
central storage: more or less, /central/storage/$HOST).

The questions are: is it a good idea to use RPM in that case? If so, 
what is the best way to set this up?

My approach would be the following:
- one "core" package for the software itself, without configuration. 
(app.rpm)
- several configuration packages for each role (app-config-a.rpm, 
app-config-b.rpm, etc), which require the core package.

The core package is installed from one machine (rpm -i app.rpm). The 
RPM database is then updated from all other machines (rpm -i --justdb 
app.rpm), and the config packages are applied afterwards.

Using --justdb is of course not an ideal solution, but everything else 
I can think about is even worse. I am not familiar with relocating the 
RPM database, but there is a possibility that the machines might have 
local software installed, so I cannot rely on having the RPM database 
completely on central storage.

Has anyone got a better idea, or just comments?
In addition: is there a place where I could find recommendations about 
using RPM on central storage?

Thanks in advance for your answer!

Best regards,
--
Stéphane Di Cesare
European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern 
Hemisphere
Garching, Germany