I personally would suggest: 1) Yes, packaging these up as RPMs can be helpful, even if it is some work. It's easy to distribute them then.
2) Look into a tool like puppet. (there are others) It has a learning curve, but I can't imagine not using it even at home. It's wonderful to be able to rebuild a complex infrastructure server from bare metal in 10 minutes - easily doable once you master the basics of puppet. Manually executed scripts are definitely way behind state-of-the-art these days. That said, you could do something as simple as tar-ing up /opt and having a one-liner that curl's it from a web server and extracts it. On Apr 15, 2012, at 1:43 PM, Christopher Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > My apologies if members don't consider this list appropriate, if so perhaps a > more appropriate forum could be suggested. > > I am using scientific linux 6.2. I will be installing it on 4-5 computers > that will make up my lab. I plan to add some additional packages from source > or otherwise: > > /opt/python2.7 > /opt/python3.2 > /opt/libreoffice3.5 > /opt/zotero3.0 > /opt/qt-4.8.1 > > ...and a few more plus a number of python2.7 packages such as numpy, pyqt, > etc. I have my environment setup pretty well on one machine with a bash > script I wrote to download make and install all the packages I need. It also > sets up a decent /etc/skel/, so that global settings are set for all users. I > would like all the machines to be identical, and I would like to be able to > update packages automatically. My question is, what is the best way to deploy > and maintain this environment onto several networked machines? Setting up my > own repo seems like a lot of overhead for a few machines. Is there a better > way? I could go around to each machine with my bash script, but what would > the best way be to handle updates? I am willing to learn about repository > management if necessary, but obviously the less effort/knowledge required the > better, as I am a relative novice at system administration. Thus, any > suggestions will be appreciated. > > Thanks, Chris >
