Local Disk Depot - Customizing the Software Environment: Customizing the Software Environment
LISA '93 Proceedings of the 7th USENIX conference on System administration
Config: A Mechanism for Installing and Tracking System Configurations
LISA '94 Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on System administration
Automating the Administration of Heterogeneous LANs
LISA '96 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on System administration
An Analysis of UNIX System Configuration
LISA '97 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX conference on System administration
What to Do When the Lease Expires: A Moving Experience
LISA '98 Proceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on System administration
Synctree for Single Point Installation, Upgrades, and OS Patches
LISA '98 Proceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on System administration
A Retrospective on Twelve Years of LISA Proceedings
LISA '99 Proceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on System administration
LISA '00 Proceedings of the 14th USENIX conference on System administration
Virtual Appliances for Deploying and Maintaining Software
LISA '03 Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Scheduling and simulation: how to upgrade distributed systems
HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Imagine: It's Saturday afternoon. You run a script, watch it for a while, then go home. When you come back the next day, 1500 workstations and fileservers have new operating systems installed, complete with all your local customizations, with the user data on each one undisturbed and without leaving your office. On December 17, 1994, we did just that. This paper will describe the infrastructure that allows us to perform completely automated updates of a large distributed network of HP UNIX computers. First, we will describe the policies we designed for distributed systems administration. Next, we will describe the tools which we developed or collected to implement these policies, and we will describe how to put it all together to do an upgrade. Throughout we will explain the philosophy behind it all and how our particular implementation could be generalized to other sites. Finally, we will describe some of the lessons learned along the way.