RPM'ize everything

[whoppe]

Hi,

Personally I would love to have all software used by DA to be in a rpm. The custom build system can still be there, but by default you use DA standard rpm's while also DA provide say a yum repository so one can upgrade thousands of boxes using yum without having to manually recompile things.

This will also help keep things standard in a large scale installation.

 

[Icheb]

At the moment my company is *still* working on an solution to this. I'm not going to say alot about it, but it is still a revolutionairy product (if we ever complete it).

I'm currently considering hiring someone local I know to be quite good at the languages we are using, but this depends on the income generated by another project...


on topic:
At the moment I really don't want to see RPM's for everything, as not every distro out there uses RPM's. And I really hate to see something like cPanel happening to DA. There it's one click administration, as I'd like to call it. Anyone can do it, until the system reports back an error...
This is also the downside of the product we're working on, we do have a solution to it, but it's taking ages to implement this. At the moment we're alpha testing it with some of our own servers, and as long as I am certain it won't cause any errors, it will work; At the moment I can force a max of 5120 servers to do something I want, as long as it doesn't involve displaying errors .
But don't expect us to finish the beta before last few months of 2005.

 

[nobaloney]

It sounds good until you need something custom done.

We used to be Plesk Gold Partners. One of our clients needed a library updated.

Updating it broke the server, and we had to hire Plesk Services to create a new install. At no low price.

If everything is RPMs, then how do you add some custom configurations to (for example) apache, if there's no RPMs for them?

Frankly, while I see problems, and while I don't like compiling on the server, I see a lot of advantages, too.

Jeff

 

[whoppe]

"The custom build system can still be there, but by default you use DA standard rpm's" =)

 

[nobaloney]

Please explain how to do it without creating a service/support nightmare.

To start with you'd have to keep track of each system's installations, and make sure that RPMs weren't being updated for services that have been installed as custom installations.

If I were the JBMC staff, I sure wouldn't want to have to support lots of systems where we'd have to start by doing a complete audit of how each service was installed.

We service "many" DA systems and we keep them updated. And we don't see any problems with the current system.

Here are a few things to remember:

DA updates their source and announces the updates rather often. You can run their scripts to update or completely reinstall everything part of customapache as often as you want.

You can set up either yum or RHN to update all RPMs the server uses automatically.

You can update other programs (such as exim) easily as well.

I surely don't want to end up in RPM hell. But that's only my opinion.

Jeff

 

[jmstacey]

I surely don't want to end up in RPM hell. But that's only my opinion.

Here here!

Imagine two beer mugs clashing together. (If only these forums allowed external smilies)