Hello all,

There is this educational institution that we manage and are looking for changing all the workstations for students from windows xp to some flavor of Linux.
We used windows environment all through and management was easier with windows domain controller. And the same kind of package is what I am looking at. Spacewalk is one that is suitable for large installations and management and it is looks like what we need. But it is for RH based distributions like RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora.
But I am also looking at Ubuntu or some Debian based as option. And need to know if something similar is available for these distributions?
If not then we will look at CentOS and Fedora. But if there is something like this for Ubuntu or Debian, then it would be nice.

You would be looking for Landscape. That's ubuntu's equivalent of spacewalk.

Have you checked out Celestia and/or Stellarium?

Spacewalk is a configuration & patch management solution for
large numbers of computers, not a virtual observatory ...



Cheers,
Tink

1 members found this post helpful.

LOL....

lol, sorry. Nevermind. I was thinking it was like that iphone app called spacewalk.

Thanks all you guys. I would have liked something that is free to use. But anyhow, have contacted Canonical for the price listing and all.
Is there anything like this which is vendor neutral or something that is free to use?

Silly question - why move to *buntu and pay for management when
you can do centos & spacewalk for free all together?

Surely on campus there shouldn't be a need for the 5000 packages
more that *buntu gives you?

Ubuntu is something I use regularly on desktop in office and also have some in that institute. And some students like the look and feel of Ubuntu. More so because it has a lot of eye candies. Those flips and rotations of windows, wobbly windows and all. That is something that has made Ubuntu so popular. And I do not think the prices for Landscape is going to be higher than buying Windows licenses for more than 100 machines.
Personally I would like to put CentOS5.4 for the shelf life it will provide plus the stability and the development environment by default.
I am just looking for some options on my side so that if one fails, I have another at hand. Aint against CentOS or Ubuntu. I use both.

Have you tried Puppet? Puppet is a configuration Management (Open Source).

I am having the same problem. I would like to setup Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on desktops and use something like SpaceWalk, but unfortunately spacewalk is only available for CentOS and Fedora (and RedHat).

We currently have CentOS on our desktops and we are managing them with SpaceWalk. We want to change CentOS to Ubuntu 10.04 because of outdated software on CentOS (CentOS is a great OS for servers!). We also thought about Fedora (replacing our CentOS), but its life cycle is too short! and Fedora LTS (RedHat) would be an expensive choice for us.

Around one year has passed and nothing has been done yet. I dont know what management is thinking about. I am against paying MS for windows but nevertheless I aint the one making decisions. Lets see what comes out. I thought about puppet as well but I did not know it could be used this way as well. I thought puppet was more designed for data center management and all.

Puppet would be a good tool for this purpose, we have been using OPSCODE Chef to manage patching and configurations for a year or so and it's been great. It has the advantage that you can use it to manage all your Windows and Linux variants with one tool ... and any virtual/cloud servers.