Hey all, this might be a simple one but I have around 8 LXC Alpine Linux containers running various services. I like to keep my servers up to date but as you can imagine, sshing into 8 servers and running the update and upgrade commands can be cumbersome as well as each machine has to redownload the same packages again and again over and over.
So I guess my questions are:
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What is the best way to update and upgrade all 8 servers at the same time?
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Is there any way I can run a package cache server so I can point all 8 servers to a single server so I only need to download the packages once?
For the updating procedure you can use Ansible. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/apk_module.html And for caching packages you could set up a local mirror, cache the via squid, etc.
Thanks for the link, definitely points me in the direction I want to go with this.
If you are set on continuing to use LXC, then ansible, puppet, salt, or chef would be the first step. That at least gets you to dip your toes into configuration management, and if you’re familiar with that the later parts will become more familiar.
Longer term you should consider moving to OCI containers and runtimes (eg docker or podman). It will feel like a big leap and you’ll question certain ways things are done (I should know, I did it myself years ago) but if you approach it with an open mind and give it a chance you’ll find that it lets your shift left on the maintenance issues you’ll be dealing with. For example with your second question, you update your base image, then build your service containers on top of that. Update once, use everywhere.
Yeah I’ve only just started to dip my toes into Proxmox virtualization so I’m definitely playing around with LXC, Docker and VMs in my homelab. Thanks for your advice I will look into this!
Have you looked at Ansible? There’s also https://parallel-ssh.org/
A cache server is possible, but might not be worth the maintenance for only 8 clients. A caching squid http proxy might be easier to maintain.
Thanks for the Parallel SSH link, never heard of that one before. And yeah seems like squid proxy is the way to go for this one.
You can create a local repository to host your package: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How_to_setup_a_Alpine_Linux_mirror
As said you can use Ansible to automate your upgrade process
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Yes, Ansible would work for this. See the apk module. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/apk_module.html
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Yes, you could run a caching HTTP proxy, or your own mirror and set your VMs to use it.
I would recommend looking into docker and/or Kubernetes, though. It would solve these problems in a much more automated way.
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