This sounds really nice. I've been using apt as a deployment mechanism not unlike the use-cases describe. While the whole thing's been rock solid, the repo management could do with a cleaner interface. Looking forward to giving it a go!
It's grokkable magic :) The Debian package format has nice functionality for deploying software such as the seed database, the script hooks and dependency checking via apt.
Keep in mind it's also possible to run your own apt repositories and have your machines source from those, allowing you to define what specific software runs on your farm, down to the smallest detail.
All in all apt can give you a very flexible setup :)
For nice current images of the Sun, the Proba 2 satellite [1] continuously watches it and dumps some nice imagery/movies. It's ESA sponsored, and both it's sensors (SWAP producing the visuals) are interpreted by the Belgian Royal Observatory. Iirc the Belgians and the Canadians are the only ones keeping a close eye on the sun, counting sun spots and such. Makes for a nice desktop bg also!
These are from the Swedish Vacuum telescope on La Palma (Canary Islands). This instrument currently offers the highest-resolution solar images anywhere.
The images shown on that page show many convection cells, called the solar supergranulation. Each cell is about the size of Earth.
What you say about who's keeping an eye on the Sun is not the case. In addition to the Swedish telescope above, the Japanese have an excellent high-resolution imager (in orbit) called Hinode, and there are multiple US space imager including SDO and Stereo, plus many terrestrial telescopes.
maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, but this event happened today, so it's pretty current. You can also get "the sun right now" at the SDO site[1], and it looks like they update those every 15 minutes.
There are also several probes that are keeping a close eye on the sun these days, from the more venerable SOHO to the newer STEREO probes and now SDO, of course.
Depending on your motives, a fun alternative to the popular Arduino for getting into microcontrollers is just ordering the naked parts and wire them yourself on a breadboard, following Sparkfun's excellent tutorials ("Beginning Embedded Electronics" on http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php). They start out very basic with building a 5V circuit, connecting an AVR, programming it, adding a crystal and a RS232 level shifter to talk to your serial port, etc, all well explained for beginners. As a software person eager to learn the electronics behind it I've had a lot of fun that way. Great company!
Nitpick; Duga 3 was never built. The one near Chernobyl is Duga 1.