Administrating more than 10 servers

[Julian H. Stacey]

Hi,
Reference:
> From:		Ahmed Ossama <ahmed at master-zone.net> 
> Date:		Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:45:36 +0200 
> Message-id:	<4CC48CE0.4060509 at master-zone.net> 

Ahmed Ossama wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Lately I was put in charge to administrate 12 FreeBSD servers, and I was 
> wonder what is the best way to 
> administrate/monitor/follow-up/update/patch these servers such that all 
> work like a clockwise with each other with the exact same updates?
> 
> I wrote few scripts that notifies me with system failure and updates, 
> but I want to manage the servers more efficiently.
> 
> Any advice/guide is much appreciated.

Some of my hardware hosts answer differently to 'uname -m', also I
don't want to have the same 'uname -r' on all hosts, so What I do:

Have a site wide directory of common stuff, mastered on one host,
& each host has symbolic links into its _local_ copy of /site for
stuff that's common, & each host has it own /etc/ & usr/local/etc
files for the rest.

No central /site on just one host via eg amd+nfs, as
that would be a single point of failure/ overload.

To replicate /site to all hosts I use rdist6 , (you might prefer eg
rsync) both in /usr/ports/net/

It's what suits me, but I'm not claiming it's best for others :-)

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey: BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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