Puppet users - Apr 2009 - softwareinventory with different preinstalled Linuxmachines / patch management

We have a grown linux environment, which are different in
hardware/distribution/installed software.
The clients are mainly maintained by our users, but sometimes we need
to ensure that certain updates are installed.

1)
We would like to gather the information about the softwarereleases
installed on our clients. This could be done with
   aptitude search -F ''%p%v'' ~i
or
   rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME},%{VERSION}\n"

Can puppet gather information about installed software/versions and
send it to a central server? Does somebody have a recipe to accomplish
that?

2) Updates / Patch management
Are there any best-practices about "Patch management with puppet"?
For example, we want to upgrade a package only if an earlier version
currently exist on the client.
When I use "ensure => latest", a package would be updated to the
latest package. It would also be installed even a earlier version was
not installed before.

Are there maybe better tools for our case?

Patrick

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Patrick wrote:
> 2) Updates / Patch management Are there any best-practices about
> "Patch management with puppet"? For example, we want to upgrade a
> package only if an earlier version currently exist on the client.
> When I use "ensure => latest", a package would be updated to
the
> latest package. It would also be installed even a earlier version was
> not installed before.
At least for Debian, a cron job of ''apt-get update; apt-get -y
upgrade''
with a private repository of known good security updates and other 
patches would do this. Let puppet create an entry for your private 
repository, then install the packages you want with ''ensure =>
present'',
and finally let the cron job take care of later upgrades. There should 
be an equivalent feature for other distributions'' package managers, but
I''m not familiar with those.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu

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