Currently, I'm doing a gig for a bank. We have a complicated web based here, involving many servers (authentication, authorization, proxies, front-end application server, back-end application server, message routing, databases). Some servers are just used and don't contain anything specific to our application, but several others do; they are however shared with other applications (lots of virtual hosting going on here).

We roll out a new version by doing an swinstall on three different machines (front-end, back-end, message router). We store all files in CVS and we use ant to build the depot files.

swinstall is package system for HP-UX, comparable with Sun's package system. I don't know whether Redhats' rpm gives the same functionality.

Abigail