[lug] Admining Linux Desktops

[Ben]

There is talk about setting up some desktop Linux machines at work. I'd 
like to make admining / upgrading as simple as possible. I'd also like 
to avoid some auto-upgrade breaking something on all the desktops. I'm 
looking for ideas / suggestions / programs, etc. I currently have a 
debian server doing file sharing, e-mail, etc, but no desktop Linux.

Here's what I'm thinking (suggestions welcome on the approach, 
alternatives, ways of doing this, etc)

1) I want to install Ubuntu on the desktop machines, but I want to 
control the upgrades. I'd like one 'test' desktop that gets updates 
before everyone else. If the updates go fine, everyone gets the updates. 
So I'm think that I'd run my own repository -- one called 
"desktop-stable" that is basically a mirror of Ubuntu, but only updated 
manually. The other is "desktop-testing" which would get updates / 
upgrades, etc. Every desktop would automatically grab the latest from 
its (local) repository. If some updates come out (or a major upgrade), 
I'd update the desktop-testing repository and check things out. If all 
is well, I'd copy desktop-testing over to desktop-stable.

2) Create one debian package (put it in said repositories) that contains 
standard configuration files (get pam / ldap authentication, nfs mounts, 
repository updates cron, etc) and requires all the packages that I would 
want installed on the desktop machines (openoffice, whatever). Then if I 
want to add another machine to the community, I can just pop in a ubuntu 
cd (or maybe setup netboot), do a minimal install and change its 
apt-sources to look at desktop-stable and apt-get my custom package -- 
installing that package will do the configuration and grab all the 
standard packages I want installed. The goal is to make it very easy to 
add computers to the linux desktop, recover from a dead hard drive, etc. 
Also if someone wants a piece of software, I can just add it to packages 
requirements and then every machine will grab that update and install 
the additional software. If down the road I need more specificity (some 
desktops need X, others don't), I can add more packages like this and 
selectively install some on certain machines.

Thoughts?