Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Managing updates on many identical Gentoo systems

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org>]

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On 01/19/2018 07:03 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> On 1/19/18 9:45 AM, Alec Warner wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 5:13 PM, Bill Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au> wrote:
>>
>>> On 18/01/18 23:36, Duncan wrote:
>>>> Anthony G. Basile posted on Thu, 18 Jan 2018 06:46:53 -0500 as excerpted:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm trying to design an update system for many identical Gentoo systems.
>>>>>  Using a binhost is obvious, but there are still problems with this
>>>>> approach.
>>>>>
>>>
>>> I'd suggest go for a semi diskless OS - boot them from one central image
>>> with an individual overlay filesystem with local customisations.  NFS
>>> mount the common directories.
>>>
>>> you just have a one central host to build for and don't need to worry
>>> about portage everywhere.
>>>
>>> Worked ok with a small number of mythtv frontends.
>>>
>>
>> It doesn't work if you have a WAN; NFS needs low latencies between the NFS
>> server and the client or you will have a bad time.
>>
>>
> 
> Zac pretty much nailed the requirements in bug #644990.  You should not
> need the portage tree at all, neither locally nor via any network
> filesystem.  He mentions there that it is currently possible via "a
> dummy profile", but I'm not sure what he means by that yet or how to set
> one up.

The dummy profile consists of making a /etc/portage/make.profile/
directory that is nearly empty, containing only a make.defaults file
with minimal settings like these:

ARCH="amd64"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="**"
ACCEPT_LICENSE="*"

You also need a big IUSE_IMPLICIT setting in there if you don't have
this patch that's in portage-2.3.19:

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/portage.git/commit/?id=2382082dcfce5e6c2be7c4dd6aed7c32e1d20616

With the dummy profile, you can install all of the packages available in
the binhost. Currently, there's not a really good way to tell emerge to
install all packages from the binhost, but you can parse them all from
${PORTAGE_BINHOST}/Packages and write the list to /var/lib/portage/world
or something similar. Then `emerge -vuGD @world`.

I've described my currently planned sequence of steps here:

    https://bugs.gentoo.org/644990#c3

If you try the dummy profile approach, then if there are any in-place
package moves in the binhost then you may have problems with file
collisions, but I've described how I plan to handle that in the above
bug comment.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac


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