pkg integration spacewalk question

[Jason Helfman]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:51 PM, Jason Helfman <jgh at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Jason Unovitch <jason.unovitch at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi Jason,
>> Some of the functionality looks similar to what is in Puppet. I've been
>> working on finalizing a "how to" running Puppet open source with its
>> Dashboard on an Nginx/Ruby on Rails/MariaDB back-end. Unfortunately I
>> haven't tried any FreeBSD clients yet and only have experience with Linux
>> clients talking to the Puppet on a FreeBSD server. If the pkg integration
>> works as well as integration with the Linux package mangers, declaring
>> having the latest versions of packages would be enough to ensure everything
>> got updated. With a private pkg repo that gets vetted and updated when
>> security issues come up I could see this working rather well for ensuring
>> tight configuration control. Once I get around to testing some FreeBSD
>> clients I'll see how well pkg integration works out.
>>
>> If Puppet doesn't work for you, other options to look into are Cfengine,
>> Chef, and Salt. I've just stuck with the first tool for the job that I
>> tried as it worked well. I'd be more than happy to point you to the how to
>> guide when I'm done as I'm planning on putting it up on the forums for
>> anybody who can benefit from it.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jason Unovitch
>>
>
> Hi Jason.
>
> I've run puppet for years, but have never run the 'dashboard,' however I
> have run it recently taking advantage of 'pkg' repositories. This is a
> different request, though. This is on-demand. So I check a group of
> servers. I can work with that group of servers, and proactively see how
> many packages are out-of-date. I can then select those servers, and upgrade
> packages of those specific systems.
>
> I believe part of this can be done in 'puppet,' but puppet is very good at
> configuration management, and trigger based actions. I have not found any
> part of puppet that shows it is a good tool for patch management, or
> massive pkg deployment/upgrades.
>
> I may have missed where you can do this efficiently with puppet. However,
> I would be happy to discover this, as well :)
>
> I've worked slightly with the others you had mentioned, but still am
> unsure if they are as what I described what I am looking for.
>
> Nonetheless, I look forward to reading your forum post.
>
> -jgh
>
>
With a bit more investigation, it seems that the Puppet Enterprise Edition,
which is non-free, seems it would be a good fit and has what I was looking
for. It would just be a matter of making sure the pkg piece works with it.
I would assume it does, as I've had that working on the standard edition.
Thanks for your ideas, and I appreciate your time.

-jgh

-- 
Jason Helfman          | FreeBSD Committer
jgh at FreeBSD.org     | http://people.freebsd.org/~jgh  | The Power to Serve