I just use mrepo and kickstart for RHEL/CentOS RPM-based distros. I've already put in all the work to figure out how to do %pre and %post script stuff to make it do what I need it to (which is actually quite complicated).
As far as O/S and Distro religious wars, my opinion is that they all basically suck in their own unique ways, and that I'm probably going to wind up supporting RHEL at some point due to third-party software demands, so RHEL/CentOS it is, since that is the linux distro which -- like it or not -- won the popularity contest in the enterprise-class space in the U.S. On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, C.M. Connelly wrote: > 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 > *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* > _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
