Unix administration - Patch management

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Author Patch management
waloo

2004-11-22, 5:51 pm

Hi,

How do you, admins succeed in managing your *nix platforms ?
I can undestand for Win32 there are SUS, GPO, Windows Update, SMS, WUS soon.
But what is the real solution for *nix when you have to manage 100+ servers
with differents configurations ?

On each of them, you install through smit or patchadd/pkgadd or rpm -Uvh
?????

Are there any good solutions (free or for sale) to do this job in a good way
?

If there are any, what type of package do you prefer to use for managing
patches ?


Thanks


Dave Hinz

2004-11-22, 5:51 pm

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:25:48 +0100, waloo <donotreply@nomail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> How do you, admins succeed in managing your *nix platforms ?
> I can undestand for Win32 there are SUS, GPO, Windows Update, SMS, WUS soon.
> But what is the real solution for *nix when you have to manage 100+ servers
> with differents configurations ?


For Solaris, I like patchdiag from Sun. It compares your system's patches
to a reference list of available patches for your system, and gives
a report of what you have that's out of date, what you don't have at
all, and the headline of each patch and what it's for.

> On each of them, you install through smit or patchadd/pkgadd or rpm -Uvh
> ?????


Yes, the installation tool varies by platform.

> Are there any good solutions (free or for sale) to do this job in a good way


Each platform will be different.

> If there are any, what type of package do you prefer to use for managing
> patches ?


Yes, we have a spreadsheet we use to record the date of the latest
(quarterly) patch run for each system. You could probably find a
commercial product to bundle this all into one wrapper, but it
sounds crufty and expensive to implement. Just learn the 3 or 4
tools for the 3 or 4 platforms you admin, and keep track of 'em
in a central place.

Dave Hinz


Ulrich Herbst

2004-11-23, 8:27 am

"waloo" <donotreply@nomail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> How do you, admins succeed in managing your *nix platforms ?
> I can undestand for Win32 there are SUS, GPO, Windows Update, SMS, WUS soon.
> But what is the real solution for *nix when you have to manage 100+ servers
> with differents configurations ?
>
> On each of them, you install through smit or patchadd/pkgadd or rpm -Uvh
> ?????
>
> Are there any good solutions (free or for sale) to do this job in a good way
> ?
>
> If there are any, what type of package do you prefer to use for managing
> patches ?
>


For AIX (you mentioned smit): use a NIM server
For RedHat: Use RHN and up2date and a central script to start it on
every server with ssh
For Debian: Use apt-get and a central script to start it on every
server with ssh

Central script: something like:

#/bin/sh
for server in server1 server2 server3 server4; do
ssh root@$server "do anything like up2date or apt-get"
done

And a ssh key agent is a nice thing.

Uli


--
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| |
| Ulrich Herbst |
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| Ulrich.Herbst@gmx.de |
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ooO Ooo
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