Managing BSD desktop clients - "Fencing in the herd"
Hauke Fath
Abstract
The members of the BSD family have traditionally prospered off the
desktop, as operating systems on servers and embedded systems. The
advent of MacOS X has marked a change, and moved the desktop more into
focus.
Modern desktop systems create a richer software landscape, with more
diverse requirements, than their server counterparts. User demands,
software package interdependencies and frequent security issues result
in a change rate that can put a considerable load on the admin staff.
Without central management tools, previously identical installations
diverge quickly.
This paper looks at concepts and strategies for managing tens to
hundreds of modern, Unix-like desktop clients. The available management
tools range from simple, image-based software distribution, mainly used
for setting up uniform clients, to "intelligent" rule-based engines
capable of search-and-replace operations on configuration files. We will
briefly compare their properties and limitations, then take a closer
look at Radmind, a suite for file level administration of Unix clients.
Radmind has been in use in the Institute of Telecommunication at
Technische Universität Darmstadt for over three years, managing NetBSD
and Debian Linux clients in the labs as well as faculty members'
machines. We will explore the Radmind suite's underlying concepts and
functionality. In order to see how the concept holds up, we will discuss
real-world scenarios from the system life-cycle of Installation,
configuration changes, security updates, component updates, and system
upgrades.
Speaker
Hauke Fath works as a systems administrator for the Institut für
Nachrichtentechnik (telecommunication) at Technische Universität
Darmstadt. He has been using NetBSD since 1994, when he first booted a
NetBSD 1.0A kernel on a Macintosh SE/30. NetBSD helped shaping his
career by causing a slow drift from application programmer's work
towards systems and network administration. Hauke Fath holds a MS in
Physics and became a NetBSD developer in late 2006.
Keywords
Managing Unix desktop clients, software distribution, tripwire