Large Fedora deployments (was: Re: WTF? Inaccessible bug reports?)

[Pekka Pietikainen]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 07:41:33PM +0100, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> [Sent it personally instead of to the list by mistake]
> 
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 06:06:54PM +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 15:51 +0100, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 08:26:47AM -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > > Perhaps you should calm down a bit.  Flying off the handle before
> > > > asking if the bug permissions can be changed or an explanation is
> > > > provided is probably not going to be very productive.
> > > 
> > > Well, sorry.  Fedora becomes worse for my use with each release I try,
> > > and I'm starting to get really annoyed at that, because it used to be
> > > so much better.
> > 
> > May I ask what's "your use"?
> 
> My use is a team in a lab with 100-200 machines, about 30 of them
> physically on people's desktops, about 80 in two oscar clusters.  Some
> of the people could do system administration, some couldn't, most
> don't want to anyway.
> 
> Since I ended up as sysadmin-by-default, I need a distribution which I
> can install and update with a minimum amount of fussing, and where the
> installation has pretty much everything the users are going to need.
We're in a somewhat similar situation here. I think how things might
work well is having one box where "anyone" could install packages from
specified RPM repos. After everyone is happy with that one box,
the package list from that machine gets put into ks.conf and also synced to
all machines after being reviewed by the admins.
 
This could then be repeated every time someone needs their favourite editor
etc. added to the default install. Preferably with no extra privileges required
to use yum&graphical versions (PackageKit?)

Currently it's * from the DVD + some custom packages from Everything/livna.
I install my laptop manually since even the * from DVD is so bloated :/

Or maybe what's needed is a "everything a scientific desktop user might ever
want" spin. KDE/ooffice i18n files for obscure languages are probably the
most annoying extra payload * gives. And also those enterprise management 
thingies that I can't even figure out what they actually do, but there's
some mystery daemon started on boot by default nevertheless.

YMMV :P

-- 
Pekka Pietikainen