softwareinventory with different preinstalled Linuxmachines

[Henning Sprang]

Patrick Cervicek wrote:
> We are more interessted in FAIs "softupdate" function than "install". 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 Fai
> ... gather information about installed software/versions?

Not by itself but by having a script that runs dpkg --get-selections or 
doing the above with RPM.

Which distributions do you use?

> ... be installed on clients, which have not been installed with FAI?

Yes, just install the package fai-client and configure the place where 
it should get it's configspace from.


> Often the packagenames differ from debian, suse, gentoo.
> Are there maybe better tools for our case?

I use something like this:

- have classes for each distriobution and version - like 
DIST_DEBIAN-ETCH DIST_DEBIAN-LENNY, DIST_SUSE-10.2, DIST_RHEL-5.0

- for real use cases have classes like WEBSERVER OFFICE-DESKTOP, ...

- if package names differ, I have a packagelist, for example for
WEBSERVER (hypothetical package names here), witzh generic packages, and 
class-dependent sections for dist-specific packages:

packages install
apache

packages aptitude DIST_DEBIAN-ETCH
libapache-php5

packages yumi DIST_RHEL-5.0
apache-webserver
apache-php5-module

packages yasti DIST_SUSE-10.2
...


BTW: while writing, I realize that the "install" only works for Debian, 
so you need an own package list fopr each distributions.
But it would be intersting to have install work flexible, determining 
which package manager is the default for the target distribution, so we 
_could_ have generic packages. On the other hand, if you have more than 
two distributions, the likeliness of having the same package names for 
all is very small...)


> Patrick
> BTW: Where can I send improvements for the fai-guide.pdf?

Please file a bug with patch(or description of what you want to have 
optimized) in the Debian BTS against the package fai-doc - see the wiki 
for instructions.

Thanks!

Henning