debtags as a way to install and manage classes of machines

[Spike Spiegel]

Hi,

I'm playing around with some ideas to manage a large (10K) number of
debian machines and a friend suggested that I had a look at debtags to
solve the "problem of classes". Basically I need  to maintain a list
of boxes and what they do (what classes they belong to, ie web, db,
email) and install software and configs (which are managed as deb
packages) accordingly. Do you believe debtags could be used for this?
for example what if the tag was the name of the machine? can you use
regular expressions in tags so that you could have stuff like
web[0-9]+ meaning that all boxes named like that would get those
packages? Are there limitations on the length of the tag, number of
tags, or total length of the field? would it cause performance
problems to have a few hundreds tags assigned to a package?

And just to mention, I'm aware of solutions like puppet, cfengine and
the like, but we'd like to  keep it as debian as possible because we
already have quite a bit of infrastructure in place to manage things
that way and it looks like with some tricks it should work just fine
(maybe not with debtags tho, but rather with custom repository
structures, don't know yet).

thanks

-- 
"Behind every great man there's a great backpack" - B.