Cross-Distro Remote Package Administration?

tobiasly writes "I administer several Ubuntu desktops and numerous CentOS servers. One of the biggest headaches is keeping them up-to-date with each distro's latest bugfix and security patches. I currently have to log in to each system, run the appropriate apt-get or yum command to list available updates, determine which ones I need, then run the appropriate install commands. I'd love to have a distro-independent equivalent of the Red Hat Network where I could do all of this remotely using a web-based interface. PackageKit seems to have solved some of the issues regarding cross-distro package maintenance, but their FAQ explicitly states that remote administration is not a goal of their project. Has anyone put together such a system?"

Comments

Re:Remote admin of a UNIX box?

[Nursie]

That does actually sound really cool and could be a huge timesaver for admins with a large suite of similar machines.

Re:In centos you could try

[Vanders]

Yes but that implies you are not "mindlessly updating packages": you're carefully controlling the packages that are available via. your local YUM repository. The grandparent seems to be implying that you should just switch on YUM & cronjob it to pull every available update from the global YUM repo, on every server, which is clearly a bad idea.