[rhelv6-list] How do people keep track of third party software?

[Gary Gatling]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Eivind Olsen <eivind at aminor.no> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> I'm wondering how people recommend to keep track of / making sure third
> party software is kept up to date. Let's say you have >10 servers running
> RHEL6, and you have to install some third party RPMs on some of these
> servers as well as upgrading it every now and then (Oracle Java? vmware
> tools? Other software that doesn't have any official repository...)


I use several methods and I'm sure I fail at all of them.

We use the same slightly modified RHEL 6 distro for both servers and
desktop type systems. Many of the desktops are used in computer labs by
students.

I have some yum repos. Mostly they have my own rpms in there but sometimes
I add some from some other repo by hand. When I learn there is a new
version I rebuild and run createrepo on the repo. I probably fail at this
method the hardest in keeping things updated.

I like installing software where they already have a third party repo. Like
google chrome. We have to use GMail + google apps where I I work so we had
to add Chrome to all the desktops. This was made easy by google having a
yum repo that you can update from. So chrome always stays up to date.

We have a lot of software installed on a network filesystem called openafs.
I'm sure the software could also be installed on something like nfs but
openafs gives us better management of the data and permissions. So users
can run software out of afs volumes that are stored in a database. They can
"add" software and the afs volume is added to their path and some
initialization scripts are run if needed

The command we have to make this software available to an end user is
called "add." If a user types it without arguments an "advertisement" of
the most popular addable/software packages names are displayed.

So like for java, which they teach with in the java classes, they can "add
jdk" and that gets them jdk7u5 in their path. But older versions are also
available. Like they could also "add jdk6u31" if they need an older
version. I do a new version about every 6 months. So I admit I'm probably
failing at keeping everything always at the newest version if I only look
at these every 6 months. But the java on the system is still maintained by
Red Hat with the openjdk package so its less risky. They only get the new
java when they "add" it and even then its only good for that terminal
window.

We have tons of commercial software installed in this manner such as
matlab, ansys, opnet, cadence design tools, and so on.

We have 1 full time employee and 1 part time employee just to keep track of
a lot of this commercial third party software.  They do things like license
renewals, downloading new versions for me to install, keeping the windows
and Red Hat software as in sync as possible, getting license manager
software,  etc...

I understand this concept was pioneered by MIT back in the 80s and we got a
lot of our software from them back in the day. Look up project Athena if
you are curious.

We also use bcfg2 for configuration management but we are switching to
puppet soon.

Would like to hear how others are solving this problem also.

Cheers,
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