When I started this job in 2001 or so, I inherited a bunch of machines running Red Hat (6 & 7) along with a cloning system based on Ghost. Although I'm a Debian developer, I decided to stick with Red Hat because (1) that was what people were familiar with, (2) it came with really nice tools for deployment that were better than what I could find for Debian at that time, and (3) it seemed like they were doing a better job of doing regular releases and thus (4) had more up-to-date software without being broken a lot (like Debian testing). I ended up writing a bunch of Perl scripts to generate custom kickstart files for doing network installs and do the initial configuration for each machine, and replaced or rebuilt all the machines.
When Red Hat dropped its free distribution (in 2003), I spent some time looking at the options again, and still wasn't sold on FAI. I might have eventually gone with it anyway, but I'd stalled long enough that the CentOS project came along and allowed me to keep using the code I'd written. That system has continued to work well for us (this summer included a major push to move most of our systems onto CentOS 5.3), but Cobbler, which seems to do more or less everything my system does, but with actual developers and support, seems like it's worth looking at. Cobbler also seems to support Debian/Ubuntu and SuSE, and it can be used to push firmware updates for Dell and HP systems. Red Hat has also opened up their RHN server as Spacewalk, which might be worth a look for some environments. On the Red Hat family vs. Debian family front, I would say that they're both frustrating in different ways. I've had better luck getting things to just work with the Red Hat-based systems, but I've also been annoyed by the amount of software I've had to package myself (even with third-party repos such as RPMforge), almost all of which is already packaged for Debian. But I expect that any other distro you might look at is going to have similar issues -- they're all going to work, eventually, and they're all going to be more or less the same once they're up and running, but there will be some things that will be more or less of a pain on one distro than another. Claire *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Claire Connelly [email protected] Systems Administrator (909) 621-8754 Department of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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