RPMManager Features

It was not a difficult decision to decide that whilst venerable, RPM represents the best choice technology for both building and deploying software on Linux systems. We've ensured that RedHat's up2date and yum clients, and Novell's RedCarpet and rug graphical and command-line clients can connect to download and deploy RPM packages. Both Oracle and Mandriva use the RedHat tools so we can deploy to these systems as well.

No only do the clients connect to the system using web protocols, but the control and management of your RPMManager is just a matter of pointing to the same URL's with your web browser. It is very easy to configure and customise your system through the web. RPMManager makes use of the Plone Enterprise Content Management (ECM) framework, which proves to be very powerful.

We have embraced RedHat's concept of software channels to silo groups of related software that perform would be distributed only to server's performing thos functions. Naturally we've extended it - this is integrated into our billing module where we associate values (prices and costs) with these as inventory in the order management system. This may be configured in arbitrary fashion.

While it's not necessary to use subscriptions with RPMManager, it is a powerful way to set up system configurations in advance of their deployment. A subsciption can be for a single server, a specific number of servers, or for an unlimited number of servers. Each machine of a subscription is (initially) given access to the channels available on that subscription.

A subscription is the item that we perform customer billing upon, and policies may be set as to whether inactive server's on a subscription may be forfeit or recycled amongst others.

We've been building e-commerce systems for a long time, so you would not expect less than the general ledger and order management modules that are available to the application. There are configurable order workflows, receivables account for each customer, and much more. Our internet card merchant gateway handles payments of both purchases and balances on account.

We used the Plone ECM for RPMManager specifically so that you have complete control over the look and feel of the RPMManager website. It is standards-compliant and not at all difficult for web-designers and web-developers to make arbitrary customisations to. There are many independent solutions vendors who understand this technology and can help with this.

In terms of creating a branded Linux distribution, this too is relatively straightforward. There are only a few packages with images and brand information.

We can support and undertake all such work.

While we believe that conformance, compliance, and reproducablilty benefits alone make this system attractive to manage even a small group of systems, it is obvious that a massive network will gain even more.

We employ a range of technologies to handle large networks. We can deploy a cache server in front of the RPMManager application server (we both recommend and ship this anyway), we can also deploy cluster configurations in both sole and replicated guises. If you've SAN or other data centre infrastructure available, RPMManager can take advantage of this.