[Beowulf] managing debian packages

[Guy Coates]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

> Hello to all Beowulfers,
>
> A simple question: so we have cfengine2 to manage configs  through the
> hosts. But its "packages" section is quite handicaped so there is a
> question: how do you manage installing packages on  nodes which
> some times might differ a bit but most often have the same set of
> packages. I have in mind Debian packaging system


For the installs, take a look at FAI; it is the automated debian
installer. It is extremely flexible, so you can hack it about to do pretty
much anything you want.

Once the machines are up, dsh is a fine way of keeping things up to date
or installing new stuff.  If you don't want to be pestered by
configuration questions during package installs, you can change that
behaviour in /etc/debconf.conf to make everything non-interactive.


There is also a rather nifty debian package called jablicator. You run it
on a master system and it creates an empty deb file which depends on every
deb installed.

If you then install that deb on another machine, it will auto-magically
install whatever it needs to make it a clone of the master. It probably
won't handle config files, but dsh/cfengine can handle that part for you.

Cheers,

Guy


-- 
Dr. Guy Coates,  Informatics System Group
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 834244 ex 7199