On 01/01/2013 05:15 PM, Friedrich Locke wrote:
Hi folks,
i am managing some openbsd machines. There are a company, here, in the city
a live that holds about 3k machines and i not including servers hardware;
only desktop.
I was wondering: How do you manage such a volume of nodes, i mean, in an
efficient manner.
Any experience with that ?
Thanks.
depends on your definition of "manage" and how the machines will be
used...and I'm assuming "3k" means around three thousand computers, not
MIPS3000 systems.
If they are, for example, student machines, you probably want them
re-imaged regularly (weekly? daily? between each user?), so building an
app to do this into a PXE booting system might take care of a great part
of your challenge (bsd.rd hacked to have its install script do a forced
reload/reimage) I'm guessing that diskless (or mostly diskless)
workstations wouldn't give the performance users expect, but if that's
wrong, that's a better choice.
If they are business workstations, you probably DON'T want to do
complete reloads unless someone really hoses their machine, and you
probably don't want auto forced updates all at the same time. I'd
probably set up a hacked bsd.rd to be PXE booted when someone wanted to
upgrade, and you would monitor your daily reports (automated!) to
produce a list of out-of-compliance machines that need to be updated for
manual poking.
btw: rdist is in base.
Key thing is to decide for yourself exactly what "manage" means, then
work out the tools that can help. But when you have lots of similar
machines, things need not be difficult.
Nick.
