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Simon Waters wrote: | Kai Hendry wrote: | |>On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 12:01:06PM +0100, Simon Waters wrote: |> |> |>>One that burnt me the other day was that as far as I can discover Debian |>>apt, doesn't log activity. If true this is a serious issue for some |>>potential commercial users of Debian. |> |> |>apt-get update | tee moo.txt |> |>perhaps script too? | | | Or an alias, but what I mean is if I am handling packages, it should log | package handling. | | Your above approach doesn't fix it if while I'm away Neil comes in and | does "dpkg -i /mnt/cdrom/packagesimonshouldhaveupgradedlongago". He | might forget the "tee" if he apt'ed, or bypass my aliases, and what | happens if it runs out of disk space due to the logging.... | | I appreciate these issues can be made up by good procedures, that was | the Microsoft line at the W2K launch - I paraphrase "the real problem | with data centre NT, is that NT admins have no experience of data centre | procedures" - but even those who do struggled to find out what files | were upgraded by what patch, when, and who was logged in doing it at the | time (Administrator of course). So good audit trails should be an | option, and probably should default on. | | Maybe I'm old fashioned and should just design to put root disks on | network storage, but then my network storage system had better have | stunning change control itself. Coz I've been there when the network | storage device revealed the bug in that last firmware update, and it | wasn't pretty, even if it did fix an NFS v3 bug :-( | | |>The way I see people updating debian is like: |>for i in machines: |> ssh i -c some_command |> |>Something like that... | | | Done that, been there, with HP-UX and swinstall, but Debian has tools | more like the expensive HP ones, which I haven't tried out yet for | managing groups of computers under Debian. | | The HP tools let you schedule trial updates to ensure dependencies are | okay, and you have enough disk space in each logical volume. So be | interesting to see how Debian compares. So you can designate some of | your HP workstations as "test" boxes, and then schedule a test upgrade | to make sure the upgrade will work, before scheduling the genuine thing | for when the development team are asleep (everyone always tests things | on the developers systems in my experience - "developer" is a little | known synonym of "guinea pig" - probably because they often bring fixes | or workarounds with their bug reports). | | swinstall (and friends) were the best of such tools in the proprietary | world I saw, this was all "enterpise quality" software back in the mid | 90's. Sure none of it is terribly clever, and you can get 99% with cron | and a few scripts, but in enterprise environments, putting your own | scripts in for this sort of thing is hard work, not least because it is | tough for the little guys to test. Ironically schools and universities | would make an ideal test site for such software, as they face the same | issues, but downtime tends to be less critical. | | Don't get me wrong, I think Debian is superb, just want to learn (or | fix) specific aspects. It is interesting how slow progress in the | proprietary Unix world is in comparison to free software. Although I | note that Debian stable/testing turn over is very slow, and solid, given | the tagrets they set themselves the results are definitely comparable to | proprietary Unix system vendors. | | Although an interesting question is was Unix slow because it tried to be | unified. GUI development seemed to die after every vendor went with | HP-VUE (oops CDE). This battle between standardisation and diversity | seems to be my theme for the month. | | Simon
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