I'm working on rolling out Puppet, but I'm stuck and I know somebody has solved this problem...
We have an engineering environment of around 200 Centos servers, plus a production environment of roughly the same size. Currently, when we roll out a new server, we do a 'yum update' so the new server has the latest packages; however this means that just about every server has a different set of package versions - a system rolled out today will have different versions from one rolled out last month, and that will have different versions from one rolled out last year. This has bitten me in the past, where a feature developed on a recent system failed to run on an older server, so I'm looking for a solution. I am in the middle of rolling out Puppet, and we have private mirrors of the yum repos, so a solution could build on these. I can see several possible solutions: - manage changes to the yum repos, and use puppet to make sure that every server is up to date w.r.t. the yum repo. However this makes it difficult to roll out changes in a controlled way,or to rollback changes. - use puppet to list all package versions, and manage the versions explicitly in puppet, however this means that puppet is going to have hundreds of entries, and I can imagine a situation where I upgrade one package in puppet without realizing that it depends on a newer version of another package, thus puppet and yum start fighting about which version of the other package should be installed. - always make sure that all systems are updated to the latest, which means a slightly less stable environment, but avoids incompatibilities between systems, and particularly the possibility that a feature developed on a newer system will be asked to run on an older system. Has anybody else been faced with this problem, and if so, how did you resolve it? Lezz Giles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
