Making Debian Packages from Commercial Software

One of my main goals for a managed infrastructure is to make sure I have consistent versions of end-user applications installed everywhere. My users aren’t too picky about the version of xemacs installed, but they’ve got pretty stringent requirements on having a particular version of ANSYS, Abaqus, Fluent, Maple, Matlab, and other large non-free/no-source-available software …

Client OS Update

(Original post here.) For the moment, I’m working on Debian GNU/Linux. Everything bought new (since sometime last fall) has the current stable release (4.0r0, or “etch”) installed, and everything older has the previous stable release (3.1r6, or “sarge”). Assuming that I keep apt sources for both the primary Debian archives and their security updates, the …

Client Application Management (Part 2, for stow packages)

UPDATE: this page largely superceded by the stowedpackage puppet definition. Back in part 1, I outlined how I’m getting a consistent package load on my various hosts with pkgsync and puppet. This works great for things that are already included in Debian. And I’ll make .deb packages of some of our third-party commercial applications, too …

Client Application Management (Part 1, for .deb packages)

(Original infrastructures.org writeup here.) Wow, this part has been a learning experience. The things I’ve picked up out of this stage: aptitude is not apt-get. Obvious, yes. But how different they are was not apparent until this weekend. pkgsync is great, and does exactly what it claims, but read its claims very carefully, since it …

Time Synchronization

Time synchronization makes lots of things work better, including: make Kerberos tar syslog We’ve got a central NTP server on campus, and I’m using that to sync from. Puppet handles ntp and ntpdate configuration on the managed systems. Components of that setup: ntp.pp and ntpdate.pp classes imported from puppet/classes Virtualization-detecting facter recipe (originally from here, …