One of the things I’m tasked with at work is to be the point man for patch management on the Red Hat/CentOS infrastructure. A daunting task in part because patching, unless under critical circumstances, is almost impossible. It takes months and maybe years to get patches through testing before we’re able to even start scheduling patching.
One of the things we’re looking at is the Red Hat Satellite service to manage newer versions of Red Hat (6 and newer). This leaves a bunch of our older systems in the cold and one of the things I tend to avoid is a solution that only works with a subset of our environment. It might not be a good way to manage things though. But purchased tools tend to only work on the vendor’s product. This has us descend into an environment with 6 or 7 “solutions” turning it into a management nightmare. Even things like configuration managers (puppet, chef, ansible, salt, cfengine, etc) have their problems and likely only work on a portion of the systems we manage.
Anyway, while looking over something else, I discovered the kickstart manager, ‘cobbler’. This lets us manage a Red Hat, CentOS, or other environments. I did this post to remind me to look it over further.
cobbler
🙂