Synchronizing ZenPacks across multiple collectors

I have setup multiple Zenoss collectors in my environment, and one of the issue I ran into was keeping the customizations and ZenPacks in sync. Unfortunatly there is no “out of the box” way to do this (maybe in Zenoss enterprise, but not in Zenoss core).

Initially I used SCP to copy the files from my primary server to the backup servers. This was problematic since the Zenoss user didnt have a password (that I knew at least), and running SCP as root changed the ACLs.

I then remembered my old friend rsync, and a quick bit of googling suggested that it may be the answer. A little more searching and I found a simple command line to copy the ZenPack files, customizations, and ACLs without any concern. A little tweaking and I can throw this right into my cronttab to synchronize on an hourly basis

rsync -avz /usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/ZenPacks/ root@serverB:/usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/ZenPacks