NetworkWideUpdates

Revision 9 as of 2005-04-26 02:41:06

Clear message

NetworkWideUpdates

Status

Introduction

Network Wide Updates provide a framework that allows systems to have a central repository to get their software updates and new packages from.

Rationale

Network Wide Updates enable a framework that allows many systems on a network, to get updated software packages from a central repository. Some thoughts behind it:

  • Not only saves bandwidth, but in an enterprise setting, all machines are kept up-to-date

  • apt-cacher solution ?

Scope and Use Cases

  • Need to be able to push updates to a (large) gourp of machines in one go, so we don't need to touch each one
  • Might want to install arbitrary local packages / archives on all machines
  • Need to conserve bandwidth in large environments (proxy/cache)

Implementation Plan

  • Big red button to deploy the updates
    • Package auto-pkg-update (depends on ssh-server) that creats a sudo user that can only run apt-get install" and setup a ssh configuration
      • instead of sudo we may write a small sudo application that will wrap the calls to apt-get (so that the sudo file does not too complicated)
      • Tricky: generating the package as it needs a ssh key, solution: have auto-pkg-update-source that will generate the binary package.
      • the package should setup/modify the sources.list of the clients too
      • add a note about the recommended proxy/cache
      • push individual packages

1. Proxy for the packages -> 1. Investigate the various apt-proxy programs, we should probably only

  • make recommendations to the user, rather than automate this, since we wouldn't necessarily know where in their network they want a proxy and they also don't NEED a proxy for the other feartures to work: - apt-proxy - apt-cacher - squid
  • (we probably don't want to encourage a mirror/partial mirror
    • tool for bandwidth reasons)

3. Tools for the creation of local repositories should be

  • integrated. a single button creates a Packages file and a Release file and signs it afterwards. It works on a per-directory basis (repositories created like this need to integrate with the auto-pkg-update package and update the sources.list of all the clients).

Data Preservation and Migration

Packages Affected

User Interface Requirements

Outstanding Issues

UDU BOF Agenda

UDU Pre-Work