Re: Something like pkgsync for yum?

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 14:37 -0500, Jonathan Manton wrote:
> Hi.  I maintain a network of ~80 FC7 machines.  The machines are a  
> mix of hardware types, but (ideally) have identical packages  
> installed.  However, often a machine will deviate from the ideal for  
> a variety of reasons (e.g., it was offline when the user requested  
> the package).  I would like to be able to specify the packages to be  
> installed in a central location, and have packages install/uninstall  
> when this list changes.
> 
> 
> My primary use case is when I have a user request a package be  
> installed on all the workstations, typically something that is  
> already in the Fedora "everything" repository.  I don't install  
> everything by default, but there are additions that are made  
> periodically.  Right now I have scripts to ssh into each machine and  
> do the install.  But this breaks down when there is a machine offline  
> for some reason (e.g., turned off and waiting for a Dell service rep  
> to stop by).
> 
> 
> There is a Debian package called pkgsync (http://packages.debian.org/ 
> unstable/admin/pkgsync) that appears to do this for apt/dpkg.   
> Pkgsync appears to allow an admin to maintain a list of "must have",  
> "may have", and "may not have" packages, and have the installed  
> packages on a given client periodically synchronize to this list.   
> But I have found nothing similar for yum.
> 
> 
> I know there are tools such as cfengine and puppet that could do this  
> for me.  But they have a steep learning curve, and if possible I'd  
> rather find a simpler way to do this.
> 

seems like you'd be best off using a yum shell script and putting two
files in place on a web server or some such:

then you could do:

wget file

yum -y shell file

the file's contents would be like:

install foo bar baz quux
remove bad1 bad2 bad3 really_bad-1.1-1
run


put that in a nightly cron job and then you just update that file
whenever.

-sv