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

["Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@gentoo.org>]

Hi everyone,

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.

Unless there's some magic I don't know about (and this is why I'm
sending this email) each machine still needs to have the portage tree
installed locally (1.5 GB) or somehow mounted by a network filesystem
(which is not practical if the machines are not on a local network).
Furthermore, each machine would have to run emerge locally to do the
calculation of what packages need updating.

This procedure is redundant because each machine is housing the same
data and doing the same dependence-tree calculation.  It should be
possible to do this calculation on a centralized binhost and simply
communicate the update information to the remote machines.  They would
then only have to download the .tbz2's and install them, keeping a tidy
/var/db/pkg.  Thus they avoid having to house the portage tree and
burning cpu cycles that just calculate redundant information.

I'm inspired here by OpenBSD's pkg_add which doesn't require all of
ports to be installed, and mender which is a

Any ideas?

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
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