However, this approach does not scale well. If a system administrator had to log into 500 computers to perform a task which took 10 minutes, it would take over 83 hours, or two person weeks of work to complete the task on all of the computers, one after the other. Needless to say, it would be an extraordinary feat even if there were no mistakes made. Of course these are rhetorical questions. Instead, this 'wheel' has been reinvented innumerable times by people trying to solve this very basic problem.
Most solutions work well in small to medium scale installations.
At CAEN we have also reinvented this 'wheel,' establishing a scalable system administration environment which handles all of the system administration tasks outlined above. A computer sees the template area as an image that is to be reflected onto itself. Any change made to the template area will be made to the computer. Thus, changing one file in the template effectively changes that file on all of the computers. This process of synchronizing each computer's file system with the template area is done by synctree, described later.