thelinuxlink.net

I'm wondering, how to people manage huge masses of linux boxes? I hear about people moving thousands of boxes over to linux, and I wonder how they manage all of them.

Does anyone here work with a relatively large number of boxes. I mean, once you get over a dozen, things start to get unwieldy and you can't go using a GUI to update every box without wasting a lot of time. I'd like to know what software is available, and if it's possible to practice. Using something like the LTSP would probably be helpful for desktops, I imagine, but then I also read about something like LCFB, and wonder how well that works.

Or do most linux admins sort of roll their own using other tools? It would be great to see some examples.

From what i gather, large linux networks use NFS/NIS, LDAP and network manager software such as OpenNMS , Nagios ,Snort and some packet sniffers .

Of course there are many ways , including very expensive commercial products from redhat, novell , oracle and whoever sells them.

The fist sentence is the cheapest way as far because there all open source.

I seem to hear people complain about NFS, but all the others tend to receive respectable marks in their areas.

Good, need to research those, though it seems silly to try to practice those in a smaller environment, though. I only have three computers at home as it is.

I manage about 50 boxen at work - we just use RHN for the ones we have contracts for. Unfortunately for many of the others I just have to beam in and do a manual update now and then. TBH, routers are a much bigger pain in my ass. At least on a linux box, it's generally just "yum update" and be done. With the routers, I have to tftp a new image to the flash and manually upgrade each of them.

OpenNMS and nagios are great tools, but they don't help at all in terms of update management - they look at the state of the hosts on your network and send reports when things get bad.

Does cfengine hold any real promise for helping with these updates? Looks intriguing.