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.
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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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.
