Deploy a package on many systems

deci007 · 02-23-2010, 08:10 PM

I had a question on my interview today.
so how would you automate install/upgrade to a package to 200 servers.
and obviously not by going to each system physically.

Answer: NFS share , using perl script and rpm utility. But i have not done such kind of install/upgrade so my knowledge is limited.

but i want to know how would i do that on Redhat Enterprise or CentOS.

Thanks

Tinkster · 02-23-2010, 08:27 PM

With Centos (RedHat) I'd suggest setting up a spacewalk (satellite) server;
even with scripting and NFS that form of deployment is way to involved to
be done manually as far as I'm concerned.

But one "could" (if one had a privileged user account that can ssh
to all of those machines password-less, e.g. from a management work-
station) use a scripting approach.

Assuming the NFS share exists already, and all 200 machines have access
rights to it, and the user mentioned above has the right to mount it.

Code:

for i in $(cat /path/to/file/servernames); 
do 
  ssh user@$i "mount /nfsshare && rpm -i /nfsshare/package.rpm"
done

This is (almost complete) bash, not perl. But you get
the idea.

Cheers,
Tink

deci007 · 02-23-2010, 09:49 PM

thanks.
you have answered my big question. i have asked lot of people about redhat satellite and no one has been telling me the right think. and many of the people are not even aware of the term redhat satellite.
Oh well but atleast i can learn spacewalk.

another question is..
is it possible to install the spacewalk package on RHEL5 instead of satellite and do almost the same thing.?

thanks

chrism01 · 02-23-2010, 10:40 PM

Should be, but it will be unsupported by RH...