pkg integration spacewalk question

[Jason Helfman]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Jason Unovitch <jason.unovitch at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Jason,
> Some of the functionality looks similar to what is in Puppet. I've been
> working on finalizing a "how to" running Puppet open source with its
> Dashboard on an Nginx/Ruby on Rails/MariaDB back-end. Unfortunately I
> haven't tried any FreeBSD clients yet and only have experience with Linux
> clients talking to the Puppet on a FreeBSD server. If the pkg integration
> works as well as integration with the Linux package mangers, declaring
> having the latest versions of packages would be enough to ensure everything
> got updated. With a private pkg repo that gets vetted and updated when
> security issues come up I could see this working rather well for ensuring
> tight configuration control. Once I get around to testing some FreeBSD
> clients I'll see how well pkg integration works out.
>
> If Puppet doesn't work for you, other options to look into are Cfengine,
> Chef, and Salt. I've just stuck with the first tool for the job that I
> tried as it worked well. I'd be more than happy to point you to the how to
> guide when I'm done as I'm planning on putting it up on the forums for
> anybody who can benefit from it.
>
> Cheers,
> Jason Unovitch
>

Hi Jason.

I've run puppet for years, but have never run the 'dashboard,' however I
have run it recently taking advantage of 'pkg' repositories. This is a
different request, though. This is on-demand. So I check a group of
servers. I can work with that group of servers, and proactively see how
many packages are out-of-date. I can then select those servers, and upgrade
packages of those specific systems.

I believe part of this can be done in 'puppet,' but puppet is very good at
configuration management, and trigger based actions. I have not found any
part of puppet that shows it is a good tool for patch management, or
massive pkg deployment/upgrades.

I may have missed where you can do this efficiently with puppet. However, I
would be happy to discover this, as well :)

I've worked slightly with the others you had mentioned, but still am unsure
if they are as what I described what I am looking for.

Nonetheless, I look forward to reading your forum post.

-jgh



-- 
Jason Helfman          | FreeBSD Committer
jgh at FreeBSD.org     | http://people.freebsd.org/~jgh  | The Power to Serve