Manage great amounts of Fedora installations

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 08:11 +0200, Martin Jürgens wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have lots of low-end computers (500MHz) and I volunteered to make a
> internet cafe in a youth club for them. Currently they are running
> Ubuntu 6.06 quiet nicely, but at some time, I want to upgrade the
> software on them.
> 
> So I thought of Fedora. But my question is, how can I maintain that
> great amounts of computers easily? For example, how can I install the
> RPM "foo" on them? How can I tell them to update? How can I change the
> configuration files on all installations?
> 
> Note that there is nearly no money available on the side of the
> organization for doing investations.
----
- run your own repo (mrepo from dag/rpmforge), do kickstart installs.
Use 
  yum-updatesd to automatically update systems. As for changing configu-
  ration files, I use a 'post-install' script which runs immediately
after
  kickstart and prior to first boot which downloads a tarball of files,
  untars them and then finally copies them into place. Presently takes
  1.25 hours from boot to complete on new Dell Optiplex 320 (most of
that
  time is from 300+ updates on Fedora 7.

- use 'ltsp' <http://www.ltsp.org> or k12ltsp <http://www.k12ltsp.org>
to
  use them as 'thin clients' off of more capable systems. This is far
more
  time effective but you do need some capable (RAM/Processor/Storage)
servers.

Craig