I used to manage around 300 servers myself. The only way it was possible was to have a completely stripped OS. All apps we used I installed under:
/apps/<appname>/<app version>
example: /apps/perl/5.8.12
then I would symlink /apps/perl/5.8.12 to /apps/perl/current
The profiles on the machine would add /apps/*/current/bin to the path.
This allowed upgrades and roll backs just by changing the symlink to the one I wanted to be current. This also allowed me to push out versions of software ahead of time, and they just change the link when we were ready to use it.
Each machine would rsync /apps from a master distro nightly and of course I could force it with a for i in `cat hosts.list`...
This sounds a lot like what gobolinux is doing [1] with its filesystem/package manager.
Did you ever incur in more trouble than it was worth with that approach?
Making the filesystem the actual package database rather than a snapshot of what should be installed is quite tempting.
I use a variant of your approach, apt proxy for the OS and since we run VmWare Infrastructure, have a separate filesystem for each version of the app and just "mount --read-only" the current version on /opt/appname.
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I used to manage around 300 servers myself. The only way it was possible was to have a completely stripped OS. All apps we used I installed under:
/apps/<appname>/<app version> example: /apps/perl/5.8.12 then I would symlink /apps/perl/5.8.12 to /apps/perl/current
The profiles on the machine would add /apps/*/current/bin to the path. This allowed upgrades and roll backs just by changing the symlink to the one I wanted to be current. This also allowed me to push out versions of software ahead of time, and they just change the link when we were ready to use it.
Each machine would rsync /apps from a master distro nightly and of course I could force it with a for i in `cat hosts.list`...
This sounds a lot like what gobolinux is doing [1] with its filesystem/package manager. Did you ever incur in more trouble than it was worth with that approach?
Making the filesystem the actual package database rather than a snapshot of what should be installed is quite tempting.
[1]http://gobolinux.org/index.php?page=at_a_glance
I use a variant of your approach, apt proxy for the OS and since we run VmWare Infrastructure, have a separate filesystem for each version of the app and just "mount --read-only" the current version on /opt/appname.