Thierry Carrez wrote: >Hi folks, > >I would like to get your opinion on Enterprise-oriented desktop >deployment tools for Gentoo Linux (or the lack of). > >As a small company CIO, I deployed Gentoo on a small scale here but >quickly ran into scaling problems and the lack of tools to help. > >There is no obvious way to freeze a Portage tree (or to design a >specific profile) for testing on a golden workstation, to build a set of >update packages (ServicePack) and push it to the workstations, or to >have centralized accountability of what's installed where. There is no >easy way to avoid having to keep a synchronized copy of the portage tree >on all systems, even when using yourown-binaries. > >With automatic deployments, would we run into difficult-to-solve >etc-update problems ? Should/could the ServicePack system take care of >that ? > >Even in a simpler setup (preprod > production) we don't have the tools >to push a software configuration change from a test machine to a >production one. > >What tools are missing ? Is it our job to provide them ? Can it >reasonably be done ? Am I just wrong to want to use Gentoo in that >direction ? > >Next week: Gentoo-as-a-metadistribution tools :) > > I'm not sure some of the assumptions you and other posters have made are valid for the specific case of a "enterprise network of workstations and servers" in a Linux environment, or, for that matter, in a Windows-based enterprise. First of all, why would a "workstation" need to have *any* software installed on its hard drive at all? You can boot the OS off the network, load executables off the network, read shared data off the network, and even create a cluster for large computations over the network. The only thing that needs to reside on the workstation's hard drive is the unique data representing the workstation user's *legitimate* business requirements and contributions, and any desktop customizations/unique configuration files. In the ancient days, when workstation hard drives were tiny, that's how it was done.
PCs in enterprises, whether Linux, Windows, Macs or other flavors, resemble home computers only because some enterprises think it's necessary to "retain talented employees", not because they actually need to have a browser, OS, office suite, email, virus scanner, etc., loaded on their desktop machines. I work in a Windows environment, and I've got all that stuff on my PC, taking up disk space that could be used by the large amounts of data I work with as a performance engineer. The only software on my machine that needs to be there that wouldn't normally be on everyone's machine in the enterprise is a few high-end analysis packages like R and Maxima. So ... the problem actually reduces to deployment/management tools for *servers*, I think, plus a crew of IT folks who can rescue users who manage to hose up the home directory on their workstation, the only place in the building they can actually write into. :) -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
