Gentoo: Installing / Administering on Multiple Machines

[pardsbane at offthehill.org (Joshua Pollak)]

On Feb 11, 2004, at 8:10 PM, Gregory Boyce wrote:
> I've been a Gentoo user off and on since early 2002, and I'm currently
> running it on most of my machines, including my desktop at work.  Even
> with this, I definitely agree it's not a good idea to use a widescale
> deployment of machines with Gentoo.  I'm actually in the process right
> now of fixing some problems that a "emerge -u world" caused on my
> machine, and I'm not running their "unstable" branch.
>

Yeah, I know these problems occur. I've been using gentoo for a very 
long time. I imagine that if we did roll this out, we'd have a testing 
box where we test all our upgrades before rolling them out. We 
certainly wouldn't have any sort of automated emerge -u world script.

Basically, as a software developer, I work with tons of libraries. It 
would be extremely advantageous to install and uninstall packages the 
Gentoo way when I'm exploring options, as compared to RedHat way.

> 1) Go with binary packages.  Gentoo does support binary packages
> (although I haven't used them).  You should be able to build them
> exactly how you want on one machine, and distribute to the rest.  No
> need to expend binary compile time * the number of machines.

That was the plan. The real question was, once I have my compiled 
binary packages, how do I go about doing an install on other machines?

> 2) Compile for lowest common denominator.  It'll be hellish trying to

Definitely.

> 3) Look into the Gentoo Enterprise initiative that was just announced 
> in
> last week's gentoo news letter
> (http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20040202-newsletter.xml).  It's just

Thanks, I will.

> 4) If you're not going with binary packages and the enterprise edition
> doesn't work out, consider running your own rsync repository that you
> update by hand.  That way you can only upload the updated packages that
> you've confirmed work.  Note that this would only be worthwhile if
> you're supporting a LOT of machines.  If it's just a handful, fixing 
> the
> machines that end up with the occasional issue might be less of a time
> sink.

Yeah, and interesting idea, but I think I'll be sticking with binary 
packages. I know there is the new binary package installation process, 
maybe I'll check that out.

-- 
Bush/Cheney '04:
Thanks for not paying attention.