[CLUE-Tech] Managing multiple servers (long)

[Michael Robbert]

On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 09:51, Dan Harris wrote:
> I wanted to get some advice from others here on distro suggestions, 
> hopefully without causing an all-out distro war. But we're all adults 
> here, right?
> 
> Anyway, here's my scenario:
> 
> I cut my teeth on Linux with Redhat 5.2 and have just stuck with RH ever 
> since.  RPM was a really nice feature.
> 
> Then, as I started using more and more cutting-edge apps, I found myself 
> installing more things from source.  Sometimes, because that was the 
> only available form, sometimes because the rpm's were stale.  Soon, I 
> started having problems with RPMs like "libXYZ requires libABC, lib123, 
> libCRX, libblahblah" errors, aka "dependency hell".  I was thinking 
> "what the hell?  If you know you need them, go get them already!".  So I 
> learned about up2date and RHN.  So I tried running up2date several times 
>   but was denied because of high-demand on their servers.
When you say cutting-edge apps, do you mean the latest versions of apps
that Red Hat includes or do you mean apps that you can only get
somewhere else? I don't bother with up2date either.
> 
> Fast forward a few years- I now manage 8 redhat servers that are all 
> mission-critical systems.  Over the last few days I've realized that 
> every system is a completely different animal, with different versions 
> of everything, including the distro itself.  The idea of rebooting and 
> upgrading from CD's every 6 months is just not appealing to me.  I have 
> very little time to play sysadmin any more, nor the money to hire 
> someone to be dedicated to this task.  I need to spend as much time as 
> possible writing code, not applying patches and recompiling.
8 mission-critical systems and you're playing with packages so new that
nobody has even build RPMs, sounds like playing with fire to me. I have
no idea what your company does or what these systems are really meant to
do, but if they are all really mission-critical then I'd think that
you'd want to know that they are running packages that have been tested
by a large part of the open source community. 8 servers and moving to 20
soon I think that sounds like you should to expect to have a fair amount
of sysadmin duties for somebody to do.
> 
> I was so frustrated with a dependency problem last night that I was 
> ready to dump redhat completely.  So I started looking around at other 
> distros.  Debian of course has apt, which sounded really appealing since 
> it would handle dependencies automatically.  But I hadn't heard of 
> anyone using debian in a 'corporate' environment yet.
Dependency Hell can be a problem and it gets worse the further you move
from Red Hat's standard packaging. apt is an excellent solution and that
is what I use on my 5 Red Hat servers as well as all the clients. I get
apt4rpm from www.freshrpms.net which also has some additional packages
on top of the standard Red Hat ones. I also run my own apt repository by
mirroring a Red Hat mirror as well as freshrpm's ftp site. That is what
I'd recommend since it sounds like all your experience is with Red Hat.
In case you still want to move to Debian I did have a good friend back
in Ohio that ran an entire small manufacturing firm on Debian servers.
The only reason that I'd recommend that you move to Debian is if the
packages you need are supplied by default in Debian and not Red Hat.
> 
> Then, I looked into paying the $60/yr per system to subscribe to the 
> 'basic' redhat network.  The idea of letting up2date run willy-nilly on 
> my system, updating what it deems necessary is a bit scary for me.  I 
> dont trust that it's not going to overwrite something that I carefully 
> "configured --with-one-million-custom-options" with a 'default' install.
Make sure you document these kinds of installs. You'll need to upgrade
them at some point anyways and you'll want to know how you installed it
before at least as a reference.
> 
> Am I just being paranoid?  Should I bite the bullet and succumb to the 
> 'rpm way or no way' approach of redhat?  Or, is there a better distro 
> out there to do what I want?
> 
> I'd really like some advice here from people who have been faced with 
> the problem of managing multiple servers (i expect to be up to 20 
> servers within the next two years).
> 

Good Luck!

-- 
Michael "Murph" Robbert
System Administrator for Math/CS
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO  80401-1887
Office: SH220
Office phone: 303-273-3786
Pager: 303-461-6543 or Text messages: murph_pager at bigfoot.com
Email: mrobbert at mines.edu