I would like some feedback on people's experience administering large groups of machines which do not have individual people administering them. in particular suppose one wanted to configure a given package in the same way on a 100 hosts, say, exim. In other words, can one automatically configure packages with a preset set of answers. In turn these `answers' could be administered on a single host and then apt-get could perhaps suck down these configurations once a week via a cronjob and reconfigure itself. The configuration should also be flexible enough to allow local admins on the machine to override the defaults I have set without clobbering my general changes...
let me know of your setups....I am trying to convince certain manager types (in a university setting) that debian is an appropriate solution. for an idea for what we are doing here have a look at ftp://ftp.math.uwaterloo.ca/pub/xhier/LISA91/paper.ps to see what the packaging system used here under solaris....it is a bit dated but has nice features. -walter
