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Updating Free Software in the Enterprise?
wallykeyster asks: "I'm an IT Director for a small private university in the U.S., and we are largely a Microsoft shop. We pay over $15,000 each year for our Campus Agreement so that we can upgrade the desktop OS to our version of choice, run Office, and have some Client Access Licenses. I would like to move to FOSS solutions, but I'm having trouble finding support for Enterprise management. For example, OpenOffice and Firefox (both of which I use personally) would be easy first steps, but IE is updated automatically via our SUS server (and settings pushed to clients via group policies) and Office updates will be included soon. How are other larger organizations (i.e. more than 200 desktops) dealing with software deployment and updates? Is anyone using Zen with Novell Desktop Linux?"
Unfortunatly I work for a small college in Maryland, our updates are all still done manually by hand. We still use norton ghost to do all of our mass deployments. Moving forward to something like this, that would ease my own burdon would definitly be a step in the right direction, however we have neither the budget or willingness to pay for such services. We make do with what we have, it works for us to this point, but things definitly could be better.
We have aproximatly 550 PC's on two completely differnt networks (facualty and students)
Very easy. Create Rapid install package and deploy. We updated firefox to 1.0.4 the other day to 80 clients in a matter of minutes.
Is any repackaging FOSS for distribution through "standard" tools on Windows? That's the conclusion I've come to in order to support distribution of updates.
Zenworks for Desktops (ie Windows) is now a pretty advanced and mature product. It works pretty damn well. Zenworks for Linux is pretty immature by comparison. I've seen Novell making LOTS of noise about it, but then again, they would. From what I've seen though, its the only enterprise-grade software from a major vendor to offer a central control system. Most others are very fragmented.
IMHO every university would be better off making class projects to build rather than buy infrastructure. Having such projects is useful in zillions of areas outside of CS - the Business guys can use it as a practical case for analyzing build-vs-buy efforts; the CS guys can study the theory of whatever is being done; the MIS/IT guys can get practical hand-on experience... and as people graduate they can create spinnoff companies that turn into large donations back to the universities.
Visons of Picard beating the tar out of Data and the bridge screaming something about "Blue screen of death no more!....Compile me Kernel 18.2.3e!!!!! MAKE IT SO!"
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
No No NO! Just say 'no' to imaging... Debian supports preseeded configured values to be passed to a blank system during its install and a very easy method to run a script before and after the second stage installer. Do yourself a favor and actually track the tweaks you perform on a client when you build a system. Document them and put them in the install scripts. Then you can rely on the hardware detection method built into the Debian installer to allow you a diverse hardware ecology, consistent packages and a sliding target going forward as the repository ages.
Just my $0.02 from a fellow sysadmin who has left imaging and never looked back!
DaGoodBoy
My God! It's full of Voids!
Couple of ways to handle this:
/etc/skel directory. Set apt/urpmi/yum/red carpet as a cron job to update the computer.
Thin Clients. Search Newsforge for how Largo, FL setup a the whole town's IT on Linux thin clients.
Lock down. edit permissions and or wipe the home directory on logout and rebuild from
Build a Knoppix disk. but more of pain to make it so that say remote printers work, but on modern machines that only need limited functionality like saw web and a Office Suite, Knoppix will run acceptabley. As a bonus, you no longer need Hard Drives and users can not cause permament* software problems.
*Permament inso far as needing to format the drive.
PXE Boot/ network boot, and download an image. there are a number of utils available for Linux that can build ghost images. A little creative work in scripting with tar can do the same thing.
I consider the PXE option to be the least graceful. It is wasteful on bandwith and would seem to have the highest risk of failure.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I'm looking for help doing this in smaller steps without losing enterprise-level management I have with SUS, group policies, etc.
---I completely agree. Imagine the stress of changing and the downtime (something always goes wrong). My campus switched from Microsoft Windows/Office to Linux/OpenOffice in one faculty and the computers were down for over a week. After the change a massive education process had to be started. While everything is working now.. the transition was not easy and people are still having to adjust.
/etc/init.d but local fileserver configs and setup as needed for locale) to set up the particulars. You then go to the users who want Linux or FreeBSD (or windows users whose machines are bogged down with crapware) and get a few pilot users started.
How in the hell could that happen? If you change slow, and with those users who WANT the change, it could go smooth.
You start out with a testbed, say a base of Debian or Red Hat. Then you add the init scripts (not
Once you have them up and running, then you can get the people who 'see how much better they run' and then want the "Upgrade". Yu can iron down the bugs with more users and more picky configs like 'Ive done that all the time and I want it done like that NOW'.
Then near the end of the user adoption, you force the stalwarts to succumb. There will ALWAYS be stalwarts, but prepare for some give because that person will bring in a Windows laptop. Just provide a publically accessable Windows=>Linux tools to help with migration and communication.
Its really NOT that difficult.
Key things - this is not just software distribution anymore - it's full stack management of Linux - server and workstation; Red Hat as well as SuSE/Novell.
As for customers - yes it's in use; yes Novell use it internally to manage their desktop and server machines. Usual disclaimers.
Evil ZEN Scientist
I've run both SUS and WSUS. Both have worked well for me. I have about 450 workstaions and 35 M$ servers. I patch them all without incident with WSUS now. For the last year I used SUS and my own reporting scripts. What I really like about WSUS is the reporting capabilities. Because WSUS is built on a SQL Server DB (or MSDE) you can build your own reports.
The only issues I had was getting it to run with the NSA security templates/guides. After that day of pain it's been clear sailing. Including SP4 on Windows 2000 Pro on 200 of the workstations.
No, no, no, definitively NO! This is NOT funny. This is insightful. What the hell do you think institutional education is there for, anyway? It's not to shovel money into a gaping corporate mouth; it's to teach students (IE, the future leaders of society) how to think.
:)
Computers are just a tool. They help people get work done more quickly in all manners and fashions. They are also a wonderful tool for teaching - both specifics and general concepts. One of the excellent skills which will be gained by giving students the task of installing/updating/upgrading machines - and not just CS/IT students, though I'm sure many of them could use the hands-on experience as well - is that it will help them conceptually visualize abstract structures. This is basic common sense. If people can recognize abstract structures and work within these confines, they can then apply this information applicably in the rest of their life. They'll learn how to be more organized and more systematic in their every-day approach, potentially making them better citizens and employees in their future lives.
This is very, very good advice, not "funny".
Now, granted, this would probably end up with many lab systems unfunctional for a good period of time, but that might just get them to work more diligently on getting the systems up and running.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
crap. don't know why it's so hard to find with google/freshmeat (and sf search does not work right now) - but maybe you should check out
http://wpkg.sourceforge.net/
Rich