Distro comparison

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 02:42:43PM +0900, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 01:01:51PM +0000, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> > As of 2.0 (it may have "after 1.3"), Debian committed to never
> > leaving machines without a smooth, free upgrade path unless the
> > entire architecture was no longer being supported.
> 
> This is fine and dandy, but still requires you to upgrade your
> machine.  Granted, if you have a fast Internet connection, or a local
> mirror, the process is relatively painless and smooth for Debian, most
> of the time.  But, multiply that by 1000 machines, and it still sucks.

And Debian has the answer for that, too:

- apt-proxy lets you build a local cache for all the packages that it
  sees. Think of it as Squid-for-packages. Point every machine at this
  one (or a small set of them) and get local bandwidth speeds for every
  package download after the first.

- FAI, fully automatic installer, uses a floppy or ether PROM to do a
  network-boot-and-install with no configuration on the target machine
  at all. This solves the initial install problem.

- ssh with properly installed keys and a few scripts can handle the
  generic "copy a file to n machines" and "execute a command on n
  machines" jobs.

-dsr-

-- 
Network engineer / pre-sales engineer available in the Boston area.
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr