Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy for retirement of old gentoo 'versions'

[Barry Shaw <baz@scms.waikato.ac.nz>]

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Dylan Carlson wrote:
| On Sunday 04 July 2004 6:16 pm, Barry Shaw wrote:
|
|>We've got about 250 machines currently gentooed,
|>with more to come, so we might be able to offer some insights into large
|>scale installations.
|
|
| Very nice.   Yes, I would love to know more about how you're using Gentoo
| commercially.
|

Well we're a university, so we aren't commercial as such 8).  All of the
machines are being installed via a custom script and a binary repository
that is used as a canonical source of packages.  Additions and removals
are performed automatically each night on the clients.  We've documented
the install process at http://www.scms.waikato.ac.nz/~baz and the
scripts are available there also.  The nightly maintenance process and
scripts aren't yet published but its in the works.  If you want a more
detailed description let me know and I can send you something offlist
(I'm not really sure this list is the right place for this kind of thing).

| In the past, I've done some production installs of FreeBSD with success,
| but not w/Linux yet.   A Gentoo deployment should be more
controllable, in
| my estimation, than FreeBSD, but there's a lot of work to be done on both
| to make them more sane for commercial environments.  IMO, the first
| priority is just minimizing the rate/amt of change.  That's half the
| battle.   IT folks can't be burdened with the minutae of researching &
| testing lots of tiny little package updates.
|
| The "don't rsync" solution is a kludge... we need something a tad more
| thoughtful, functional than that.  :-)
|

Definitely, thats where I see a stable portage tree as being very useful.

| If you don't mind my asking, how many of your Gentoo machines are
| workstations?  Servers?  What kind of work is done on these machines?
|

Most of them are workstations, both lab machines and staff and graduate
desktops (they are all maintained in a similar fashion).  We've only got
a few gentoo servers, mainly since we only started using gentoo here
less than 6 months ago and we're only upgrading the servers as they are
replaced (if it aint broke.....).

Baz



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