Package management on many hosts

[Paul Chvostek]

So ... on the topic of large-scale FreeBSD deployment ...

How are people handling package version consistency in large groups of
servers?  If you have a web farm with 10 hosts, plus 3 hosts in a QA
farm, and you want to make sure you're using the same version everywhere
and upgrading production to the version you tested last week in QA, do
you just do it manually, perhaps using portdowngrade on each host, or
installing binary packages built on one host?

Next, how are people dealing with portaudit info for groups of servers?
Is the old standard of a cronjob for daily `portaudit -a` results still
the best option?

I'm putting together some tools to help with this stuff, but I'd hate to
duplicate a perfectly functional wheel.

Thanks.

-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>
  Operations / Abuse / Whatever
  it.canada, hosting and development                   http://www.it.ca/