Re: [gentoo-server] Best practices in managing large server groups

[Tomasz Szymczak <ex@valis.net.pl>]

On Sunday 20 of May 2007 20:29:18 Charles Duffy wrote:
> I'm looking at replacing SuSE SLES9 with Gentoo for an enterprise
> application (for reasons of flexibility and licensing) (no, we don't
> have an enterprise application budget -- just the reliability
> requirements; yaaay, startups!). We're looking to be able to deploy and
> manage hundreds of geographically distributed servers.

I'm using some custom made gentoo setup, it's not perfect but works fine for 
me (>30 gentoo servers and >50 gentoo vservers in different locations)

Every gentoo server has mounted snapshot of portage tree compressed by 
squashfs = 40MB (vservers are using bind mounted version), it's extended by 
custom overlays (security, updates, etc). I can do 'big' upgrade of gentoo by 
putting newer portage snapshot.

I've made custom gentoo profiles (f.e. amd64-default-20061004) which are 
setting most things like cflags, use flags, overlays and inherits real 
profile at the end. Also I'm extending it by creating my subprofiles to force 
installing packages, for example:

x86-default-20061004/h  (vserver hardware node)
vserver-default-20061004/www/php5  (www vservers with php5)
vserver-default-20061004/mail  (mail vservers)

Most servers/vservers have /var/lib/portage/world empty, all packages are 
forced by putting it into 'system'. Also, /etc/make.conf on all servers are 
empty too :)

After emerge (compile) of package, it's sent into binhost server (via scp 
in /etc/portage/bashrc) and other servers in same profile are fetching binary 
version.


This solution is a little bit tricky, have some issues but after all - makes 
many things faster and easier for me.

regards
-- 
Tomasz Szymczak                                                   _.-.  jgs
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