Looking for any additional advise on system maintenance ..

[Spud1200]

I have a question or several questions about system maintenance and how some of you or most of you would go about your business of managing and maintaining a network or your systems .

I have all my systems on Linux. I go from terminal to terminal updating each individual system with system updates. So what I'm saying is I can run SUDO commands or I use use the update manager but generally I will go from system to system individually plugging my K&M in to each, running updates, doing tasks and maintaining software.

How do you guys do this? Do You use something like a managed switch to set up VLANS or do you simply if running Linux use SSH?

How do you keep on top of the actual physical side of cleaning and maintenance. Do you ever strip down your systems and get your hands dirty even with compressed air?

Is their any practices I could employ to make things easier?

Thanks.

 

[iFargle]

Ansible or Puppet can automate this for you fairly easily. I have almost 60 VM's that auto update (amongst other things) using Ansible.

 

[Spud1200]

Is their an exact science of doing this?

Should I be doing something else. Or am I doing something wrong?

 

[iFargle]

Not really an exact science. There's tons of ways to do it. Ansible is probably the easiest to get running as it just requires python and ssh keys