while i haven't tried this myself it may be worth a shot. make your own packages for the programs you use in .deb format
point all the machines for apt to use http on the solaris box(or ftp, but http is probably easier to maintain) then put the packages on the solaris box. create a packages / packages.gz and setup a cron script say everyday at 1am the machines run apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade. or spread the times apart to reduce load on the solaris box, since the cron script will have to be manually set everywhere(most likely) it may be best to have 1 box run apt at 1:10 am another at 1:20am etc.. you could also download any 'official' updates you want to distribute to the solaris box for installation on the debian systems. as far as installation of packages it could be as simple as tarring/gzipping up a program(compiled) with the full directory tree in it, then use alien to convert it to .deb, i dont know how to create a packages file but you could just follow the examples in the real file, change whatever you need to suit your setup. nate On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Stephen A. Witt wrote: sawitt >I seem to have started a Debian thing in the company that I work for. It sawitt >seems to be spreading. As the number of machines that we configure with sawitt >Debian grows, system administration issues start to raise their ugly sawitt >heads. We've recently gotten a dedicated sysadmin guy to take over the sawitt >admin tasks. He is very knowledgeable on Solaris, HPUX, and probably some sawitt >others, but is new to Linux. He and I are having a bit of a debate right sawitt >now as to the most effective way to manage these machines. sawitt > sawitt >We've got NIS running and all user accounts are automounted from a Sun sawitt >Sparc running Solaris. We have a mixed Solaris, Linux installation. So far sawitt >so good. What our sysadmin would like to do (this is typically what he sawitt >does for other Unixes) is to install client machines with a very basic set sawitt >of functionality. Then he would compile each application that would be sawitt >provided and install it into a directory in /home (e.g. /home/cvs/bin), sawitt >which would also be automounted when necessary from one of the client sawitt >machines. I see this as a little silly when, for Debian at least, nearly sawitt >all of the applications we use are easily installed on all the machines in sawitt >the normal Debian way. Our sysadmin sees the Debian way as interesting, sawitt >but a requirement for him to visit 25 machines instead of 1. sawitt > sawitt >My question is, is there anyone out there, preferably a sysadmin type, who sawitt >has experience with this type of thing and could give us some advice. sawitt > sawitt >Thanks... sawitt >Steve sawitt > sawitt > sawitt > sawitt >-- sawitt >Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null sawitt > ----------------------------------------[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]-- Vice President Network Operations http://www.firetrail.com/ Firetrail Internet Services Limited http://www.aphroland.org/ Everett, WA 425-348-7336 http://www.linuxpowered.net/ Powered By: http://comedy.aphroland.org/ Debian 2.1 Linux 2.0.36 SMP http://yahoo.aphroland.org/ -----------------------------------------[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]-- 10:49am up 194 days, 23:13, 2 users, load average: 1.01, 1.03, 1.00