[gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Gentoo]

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Hi all
just want to know abou this.
does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql, web,ntp
,etc..

and how about cfengine server?

did NTPL help you guys?

thanks

-- 
Life is hard

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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Michael Crute]

On 9/3/06, Gentoo <debiansid@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> Just want to know abou this.
> Does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql, web,ntp
> ,etc..

I use Gentoo in a few production environments both with my company and
our customers. Gentoo runs on boxes serving these tasks:
* (iptables) firewall
* (apache) web server
* (postfix) mail server
* (bind) DNS server
* (mysql & postgres) database server(s)
* (hylafax) fax server
* (samba) file server providing support for windows boxen
* (python) application servers running some internal applications

The short story is that I run it on just about every piece of
infrastructure that I support and I love it. I would mention that if
you plan to run it in a sufficiently large production environment that
you should invest the extra time/money up-front to setup a build
server so that you don't have to compile upgrades on each of your
production boxes. Other than that, I find Gentoo to be far easier to
mantain than any other distro that I have ever used.

-Mike


-- 
________________________________
Michael E. Crute
http://mike.crute.org

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended
up where I intended to be. --Douglas Adams
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Gentoo]

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got it,I am planning to setup build server, but I have no idea how to make
it.

thanks

On 9/3/06, Michael Crute <mcrute@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/3/06, Gentoo <debiansid@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > Just want to know abou this.
> > Does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql,
> web,ntp
> > ,etc..
>
> I use Gentoo in a few production environments both with my company and
> our customers. Gentoo runs on boxes serving these tasks:
> * (iptables) firewall
> * (apache) web server
> * (postfix) mail server
> * (bind) DNS server
> * (mysql & postgres) database server(s)
> * (hylafax) fax server
> * (samba) file server providing support for windows boxen
> * (python) application servers running some internal applications
>
> The short story is that I run it on just about every piece of
> infrastructure that I support and I love it. I would mention that if
> you plan to run it in a sufficiently large production environment that
> you should invest the extra time/money up-front to setup a build
> server so that you don't have to compile upgrades on each of your
> production boxes. Other than that, I find Gentoo to be far easier to
> mantain than any other distro that I have ever used.
>
> -Mike
>
>
> --
> ________________________________
> Michael E. Crute
> http://mike.crute.org
>
> I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended
> up where I intended to be. --Douglas Adams
> --
> gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman]

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Gentoo wrote:
> Hi all
> just want to know abou this.
> does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql,
> web,ntp ,etc..

Hi!

I use Gentoo on almost 25 production servers, in categories ranging from mail/dns, to LAMP, to
OpenVPN servers.

I love it :)

- --
Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman - VPN Mail Project - http://vpnmail.buanzo.com.ar
Consultor en Seguridad Informatica - http://www.buanzo.com.ar
http://www.vivamoslavida.com.ar - Portal no-comercial del buen vivir!
for f in www blog linux-consulting vpnmail; do firefox http://$f.buanzo.com.ar ; done
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Gentoo]

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for httpd server, did NTPL help ?

On 9/3/06, Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman <buanzo@buanzo.com.ar> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Gentoo wrote:
> > Hi all
> > just want to know abou this.
> > does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql,
> > web,ntp ,etc..
>
> Hi!
>
> I use Gentoo on almost 25 production servers, in categories ranging from
> mail/dns, to LAMP, to
> OpenVPN servers.
>
> I love it :)
>
> - --
> Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman - VPN Mail Project -
> http://vpnmail.buanzo.com.ar
> Consultor en Seguridad Informatica - http://www.buanzo.com.ar
> http://www.vivamoslavida.com.ar - Portal no-comercial del buen vivir!
> for f in www blog linux-consulting vpnmail; do firefox
> http://$f.buanzo.com.ar ; done
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFE+tejAlpOsGhXcE0RAgwEAJ4oTxJSvK1m0uK1r8qgb4VxstUCSQCdF7Jw
> 9NsheCOjQgqf9bLldIJ3M00=
> =dDA9
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> --
> gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Sean Cook]

Gentoo wrote:
> Hi all
> just want to know abou this.
> does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql, 
> web,ntp ,etc..
>
Yes... for all of it...
> and how about cfengine server?
I don't use cfengine... too much to set up for my needs.

>
> did NTPL help you guys?
>
> thanks
>
> -- 
> Life is hard 

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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Christian Affolter]

Hi!

> just want to know abou this.
> does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql, 
> web,ntp ,etc..
Yes, our whole infrastructure is based on gentoo (firewall, mail, dns, 
mysql, ldap, filer, backup etc.). Furthermore our setup is based on 
linux vserver [1], which is an awesome project! This gives use great 
flexibility and helps us to securely chain the different services with a 
relative small amount of hardware.

> and how about cfengine server?
I'm not using it, but as far as I know there's a gentoo ebuild as well 
as a portage integration for it. I think the gentoo core infrastructure 
team is using cfengine.

As soon as the shadow chroot patch [2] from GLEP 27 [3] is implemented, 
we will be able to build striped down gentoo instances without any 
development dependencies (with the help of the emerge ROOT environment 
variable) in a sane and easy way.

After that, I would like to implement a combination of radmind [4] and 
subversion for our gentoo infrastructure.


If you're interested in gentoo (or any other OS/distribution) on 
production server and you're going to manage more than 5-10 machines, 
then you should think about building an "infrastructure" [5]. An 
important part of your infrastructure, especially on a gentoo based one, 
would be a build server or "gold server" which builds and provides 
packages for your different end servers. Also consider to use a 
versioning system at least for your config files.

Last but not least I really recommend you to have a test environment ;)


hope this helps.


regards,
Chris


[1] http://linux-vserver.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/vserver-howto.xml
[2] 
http://soc.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/glep0027/patches/shadow-4.0.16-chroot.patch?rev=48&view=markup
[3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0027.html
[4] http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/
[5] http://www.infrastructures.org/
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Christian Spoo]

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Hi!

I have to agree with all of you! All of our boxes run Gentoo, at least
as the main OS. We have a AMD64 box running Xen with Gentoo as dom0 and
domU, which also runs a Server 2003 domain for development because of
SQL Server. But our other tasks, such as LAMP, Mail and FTP, are run by
Gentoo.

@Gentoo-devs: Keep up the good work!


Christian Spoo

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[gentoo-server] Re: anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Mike Kelly]

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On Sun, 03 Sep 2006 18:11:12 +0200
Christian Affolter <c.affolter@stepping-stone.ch> wrote:

> As soon as the shadow chroot patch [2] from GLEP 27 [3] is
> implemented, we will be able to build striped down gentoo instances
> without any development dependencies (with the help of the emerge
> ROOT environment variable) in a sane and easy way.

> [2]
> http://soc.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/glep0027/patches/shadow-4.0.16-chroot.patch?rev=48&view=markup
> [3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0027.html [4]

Hello,

Nice to be mentioned :-p

In regards to the shadow chroot patch, I'm poking at that bit by bit,
but I think that the upstream author is already considering doing
something similar to this. I've got a good idea of what needs to be
done when it is built w/o PAM, but when PAM comes into play, it gets
tricky.

In regards to the GLEP 27 stuff in general, I have a project which is
still at a fairly alpha level, but I would appreciate contributions of
auth system helper scripts for any and all architectures / userlands.
I've written up some documentation with some examples [1]. Also, I'd
appreciate folks who know packages well (like apache, etc) writing the
proper user/group data files for them (this format is also
documented[2]).

For those a little more curious about how this system will ultimately
integrate with portage and other package managers, you may wish to take
a look at my API specifications[3] (now with flow charts!). Or, for
those who are IRC-inclined, feel free to join me in #dynusers on
freenode.

I'll work on getting a more unified / up-to-date webpage[4] together
about his project later this week.

[1] http://www.pioto.org/~pioto/gentoo/soc2006/doc/auth_modules.html
[2] http://www.pioto.org/~pioto/gentoo/soc2006/doc/datafiles.html
[3] http://www.pioto.org/~pioto/gentoo/soc2006/doc/API.html
[4] http://soc.pioto.org/

-- 
Mike Kelly

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Re: [gentoo-server] Re: anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Christian Spoo]

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Am Montag, 4. September 2006 04:42 schrieb Mike Kelly:
> On Sun, 03 Sep 2006 18:11:12 +0200
>
> Christian Affolter <c.affolter@stepping-stone.ch> wrote:
> > As soon as the shadow chroot patch [2] from GLEP 27 [3] is
> > implemented, we will be able to build striped down gentoo instances
> > without any development dependencies (with the help of the emerge
> > ROOT environment variable) in a sane and easy way.
> >
> > [2]
> > http://soc.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/glep0027/patches/shadow-4.0.16-chroot.pa
> >tch?rev=48&view=markup [3]
> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0027.html [4]
>
> Hello,
>
> Nice to be mentioned :-p
>
> In regards to the shadow chroot patch, I'm poking at that bit by bit,
> but I think that the upstream author is already considering doing
> something similar to this. I've got a good idea of what needs to be
> done when it is built w/o PAM, but when PAM comes into play, it gets
> tricky.
>
> In regards to the GLEP 27 stuff in general, I have a project which is
> still at a fairly alpha level, but I would appreciate contributions of
> auth system helper scripts for any and all architectures / userlands.
> I've written up some documentation with some examples [1]. Also, I'd
> appreciate folks who know packages well (like apache, etc) writing the
> proper user/group data files for them (this format is also
> documented[2]).
>
> For those a little more curious about how this system will ultimately
> integrate with portage and other package managers, you may wish to take
> a look at my API specifications[3] (now with flow charts!). Or, for
> those who are IRC-inclined, feel free to join me in #dynusers on
> freenode.
>
> I'll work on getting a more unified / up-to-date webpage[4] together
> about his project later this week.
>
> [1] http://www.pioto.org/~pioto/gentoo/soc2006/doc/auth_modules.html
> [2] http://www.pioto.org/~pioto/gentoo/soc2006/doc/datafiles.html
> [3] http://www.pioto.org/~pioto/gentoo/soc2006/doc/API.html
> [4] http://soc.pioto.org/

I know it's OT but considering your post in which you describe a possible 
solution for GREP 27 I ask myself if we should think about deleting unused 
users after uninstalling packages? Think of removing the apache user after 
unmerging apache itself.

In recent Portage eclasses I never found functions like edeleteuser or 
edeletegroup (or something similar) which might do those tasks. But I'm sure 
it would be possible to implement them.

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[gentoo-server] Deleting Users / Groups from Packages (was: anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers)

[Mike Kelly]

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On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 12:49:58 +0200
Christian Spoo <mail@christian-spoo.info> wrote:

> I know it's OT but considering your post in which you describe a
> possible solution for GREP 27 I ask myself if we should think about
> deleting unused users after uninstalling packages? Think of removing
> the apache user after unmerging apache itself.
> 
> In recent Portage eclasses I never found functions like edeleteuser
> or edeletegroup (or something similar) which might do those tasks.
> But I'm sure it would be possible to implement them.

In general, doing this automatically is a bad idea. It can leave your
system with files owned by no user. Also, adding something like this in
pkg_postrm in an ebuild would screw things up, as currently there is no
way for a package to know if it is being removed totally at that stage,
or if it is simply being updated.

My GLEP 27 implementation takes care of that action by a users-update
script. The operator runs that to scan the file system for any files
owned by a user or group, optionally removing them or chown-ing them to
0:0, then they can remove any unowned users.

-- 
Mike Kelly

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Re: [gentoo-server] Re: anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Jonas Fietz]

Christian Spoo wrote:

> I know it's OT but considering your post in which you describe a possible 
> solution for GREP 27 I ask myself if we should think about deleting unused 
> users after uninstalling packages? Think of removing the apache user after 
> unmerging apache itself.
First thing I had to think of are files with associated owner-ids which 
don't exist anymore. They won't hurt anymore than with the user still 
existing, but one would not know to whom they originally belonged.

Greetings,

Jonas
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[A. Khattri]

On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Gentoo wrote:

> does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql, web,ntp

We use Gentoo for a lot of production servers (mainly web servers).

> and how about cfengine server?

We dont have a large enough infrastructure to need cfengine.

> did NTPL help you guys?

To be honest, I haven't tested with and without NPTL - all of our Gentoo
servers use NPTL ;-)


-- 
A
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Ramon van Alteren]

Gentoo wrote:
> Hi all
> just want to know abou this.
> does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql,
> web,ntp ,etc..

Yep.
We're running approx. 200 servers for a website, everything is based on
gentoo. That includes: apache, squid, mysql, dns, mail, logging, vpn,
etc. etc.

> and how about cfengine server?

Mostly custom build scripts currently but planning to convert.

> 
> did NTPL help you guys?
> 

Strangely it actually hurt our mysql-performance. Although mysql AB
recommends it. Haven't done any recent testing however.

Grtz Ramon
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Gentoo]

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so , do you have "build server" for all of those 200 systems?


On 9/5/06, Ramon van Alteren <ramon@vanalteren.nl> wrote:
>
> Gentoo wrote:
> > Hi all
> > just want to know abou this.
> > does anyone use gentoo as production servers, like mail, dns, mysql,
> > web,ntp ,etc..
>
> Yep.
> We're running approx. 200 servers for a website, everything is based on
> gentoo. That includes: apache, squid, mysql, dns, mail, logging, vpn,
> etc. etc.
>
> > and how about cfengine server?
>
> Mostly custom build scripts currently but planning to convert.
>
> >
> > did NTPL help you guys?
> >
>
> Strangely it actually hurt our mysql-performance. Although mysql AB
> recommends it. Haven't done any recent testing however.
>
> Grtz Ramon
> --
> gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[kashani]

Ramon van Alteren wrote:

>> did NTPL help you guys?
>>
> 
> Strangely it actually hurt our mysql-performance. Although mysql AB
> recommends it. Haven't done any recent testing however.

That's really odd. I've never seen Mysql do anything, but get much much 
faster with NTPL at least with our work loads. Web servers, mostly 
selects, PHP, 600-1000 connections to each of the db server. Load went 
from 1.5 to .3 on our dual proc boxes when we moved from 2.4 to 2.6 
w/NTPL. I suspect it's the number of connections we have that caused 
most of the benefit in our case.

kashani
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Ramon van Alteren]

Gentoo wrote:
> so , do you have "build server" for all of those 200 systems?

Yep several :-)

A server-image server for building install images. We deploy customized 
stage4 tarballs for installation and are in process of moving that over 
to pxe-bootable install with custom stage4 tarball based on 
hardware/serverfunction. We currently use boot-cd's which gets to be a 
bit of a pain.

A package-build server for 32 bits packages

A package-build server for 64 bits packages

A package host for 32bit and 64bit packages

A small test-environment for testing new images and new packages.

It's definitly a work-in-progress and very hackish at the moment but it 
works if we tighten the correct screws and flip the right levers :-)

Grtz Ramon


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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Ramon van Alteren]

kashani wrote:
> Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> 
>>> did NTPL help you guys?
>>>
>>
>> Strangely it actually hurt our mysql-performance. Although mysql AB
>> recommends it. Haven't done any recent testing however.
> 
> That's really odd. I've never seen Mysql do anything, but get much much 
> faster with NTPL at least with our work loads. Web servers, mostly 
> selects, PHP, 600-1000 connections to each of the db server. Load went 
> from 1.5 to .3 on our dual proc boxes when we moved from 2.4 to 2.6 
> w/NTPL. I suspect it's the number of connections we have that caused 
> most of the benefit in our case.

Let's start with "which version ?"

I'd have to look through all testing docs for the period but I remember 
that we tested NTPL with 4.0 and found it hurt our performance.

Similar work-load: webservers, reading from slaves, writing only to the 
replication-master, PHP
Maybe different sizing? We have a very large database spanning well over 
35Gb now, with some extremely large tables in it. Most dbservers are 
IO-bound not CPU-bound.

Are you using persistent connections btw ?

Grtz Ramon


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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[kashani]

Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> Let's start with "which version ?"
> 
> I'd have to look through all testing docs for the period but I remember 
> that we tested NTPL with 4.0 and found it hurt our performance.
> 
> Similar work-load: webservers, reading from slaves, writing only to the 
> replication-master, PHP
> Maybe different sizing? We have a very large database spanning well over 
> 35Gb now, with some extremely large tables in it. Most dbservers are 
> IO-bound not CPU-bound.
> 
> Are you using persistent connections btw ?

IIRC it was around Mysql 4.0.11 or so. You might have something in the 
db size. Most of our database were on the small side... in fact I don't 
think we had any servers where the databases for all the customers 
didn't fit totally into RAM of a 4GB box.

Yes it was persistent connections.

kashani
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Ramon van Alteren]

kashani wrote:
> IIRC it was around Mysql 4.0.11 or so. You might have something in the 
> db size. Most of our database were on the small side... in fact I don't 
> think we had any servers where the databases for all the customers 
> didn't fit totally into RAM of a 4GB box.

I think that might be it...
We're currently running 4.1 and are seeing almost no performance loss.
I might add that we saw almost 30% throughput increase by switching to 
the deadline IO scheduler.

> Yes it was persistent connections.

That may or may not influence the issue as well, we not using them.

Ramon

-- 
To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three 
requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others 
are useless.

Gustave Flaubert



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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Francesco Riosa]

Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> kashani wrote:
>> Ramon van Alteren wrote:
>>
>>>> did NTPL help you guys?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Strangely it actually hurt our mysql-performance. Although mysql AB
>>> recommends it. Haven't done any recent testing however.
>>
>> That's really odd. I've never seen Mysql do anything, but get much
>> much faster with NTPL at least with our work loads. Web servers,
>> mostly selects, PHP, 600-1000 connections to each of the db server.
>> Load went from 1.5 to .3 on our dual proc boxes when we moved from
>> 2.4 to 2.6 w/NTPL. I suspect it's the number of connections we have
>> that caused most of the benefit in our case.
>
> Let's start with "which version ?"
>
> I'd have to look through all testing docs for the period but I
> remember that we tested NTPL with 4.0 and found it hurt our performance.
 NTPL was un-supported by MySQL on 4.0, see [1], and support started not
much more than one year ago (prior patching the sources was needed)
>
> Similar work-load: webservers, reading from slaves, writing only to
> the replication-master, PHP
> Maybe different sizing? We have a very large database spanning well
> over 35Gb now, with some extremely large tables in it. Most dbservers
> are IO-bound not CPU-bound.
then switching thread implementation model would make no difference ;-)

[1] http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=19785

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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Jonas Fietz]

Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> Gentoo wrote:
>> so , do you have "build server" for all of those 200 systems?
> 
> Yep several :-)
> 
> A server-image server for building install images. We deploy customized 
> stage4 tarballs for installation and are in process of moving that over 
> to pxe-bootable install with custom stage4 tarball based on 
> hardware/serverfunction. We currently use boot-cd's which gets to be a 
> bit of a pain.
Well, what we do is, we have a fairly static image on the boot-cds, and 
the most recent stage4 is pulled over the net. PXE was only workable 
with a few hassles (we are using standard hardware, most of the time 
cheapest you can get), for example you always have the problem of the 
server reinstalling when rebooting or alike.
This has worked quite well, although we are in a setting, where we have 
to setup >100 servers for just one weekend, effectively reinstalling 
them every time (rented).

Greetings,

Jonas
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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Gentoo]

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is there any doc about how to setup "build server"?

On 9/9/06, Jonas Fietz <info@jonasfietz.de> wrote:
>
> Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> > Gentoo wrote:
> >> so , do you have "build server" for all of those 200 systems?
> >
> > Yep several :-)
> >
> > A server-image server for building install images. We deploy customized
> > stage4 tarballs for installation and are in process of moving that over
> > to pxe-bootable install with custom stage4 tarball based on
> > hardware/serverfunction. We currently use boot-cd's which gets to be a
> > bit of a pain.
> Well, what we do is, we have a fairly static image on the boot-cds, and
> the most recent stage4 is pulled over the net. PXE was only workable
> with a few hassles (we are using standard hardware, most of the time
> cheapest you can get), for example you always have the problem of the
> server reinstalling when rebooting or alike.
> This has worked quite well, although we are in a setting, where we have
> to setup >100 servers for just one weekend, effectively reinstalling
> them every time (rented).
>
> Greetings,
>
> Jonas
> --
> gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


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Life is hard

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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Gentoo]

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http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_A_Build_Host

On 9/9/06, Gentoo <debiansid@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> is there any doc about how to setup "build server"?
>
>
> On 9/9/06, Jonas Fietz <info@jonasfietz.de> wrote:
> >
> > Ramon van Alteren wrote:
> > > Gentoo wrote:
> > >> so , do you have "build server" for all of those 200 systems?
> > >
> > > Yep several :-)
> > >
> > > A server-image server for building install images. We deploy
> > customized
> > > stage4 tarballs for installation and are in process of moving that
> > over
> > > to pxe-bootable install with custom stage4 tarball based on
> > > hardware/serverfunction. We currently use boot-cd's which gets to be a
> > > bit of a pain.
> > Well, what we do is, we have a fairly static image on the boot-cds, and
> > the most recent stage4 is pulled over the net. PXE was only workable
> > with a few hassles (we are using standard hardware, most of the time
> > cheapest you can get), for example you always have the problem of the
> > server reinstalling when rebooting or alike.
> > This has worked quite well, although we are in a setting, where we have
> > to setup >100 servers for just one weekend, effectively reinstalling
> > them every time (rented).
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> > Jonas
> > --
> > gentoo-server@gentoo.org mailing list
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Life is hard
>



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Re: [gentoo-server] anyone deploy Gentoo as production servers

[Thomas Harold]

Christian Affolter wrote:
> If you're interested in gentoo (or any other OS/distribution) on 
> production server and you're going to manage more than 5-10 machines, 
> then you should think about building an "infrastructure" [5]. An 
> important part of your infrastructure, especially on a gentoo based one, 
> would be a build server or "gold server" which builds and provides 
> packages for your different end servers. Also consider to use a 
> versioning system at least for your config files.

(Late to the party, as usual...)

Yep, getting your /etc and other configuration files into a version 
control system will keep you from tearing your hair out.  Or wonder what 
you had to change to make "XYZ" work properly.  I find that keeping the 
entire system in version control is too difficult to be worth it and 
focus my efforts on VC'ing any file that I've edited (or would be likely 
to edit).  Takes about 15-30 minutes to get started (depending on how 
familiar you are with Subversion or whatever VC system you use), but 
easily saves you 30 minutes down the road.

Combine that with daily/weekly snapshots using hard links to another 
disk on the system (or a remote disk) and you've got something really 
easy to deal with.  Remote backups are nice and secure, but sometimes 
it's nice to have a quick-n-dirty browseable local partition with 
snapshots of the O/S files.

...

Those two abilities are the primary reason that we're moving servers 
over to Linux.  It makes system administration and undoing minor "oops" 
issues extremely easy.  (The secondary reason is that we're moving to a 
Xen-based infrastructure with SAN-based storage to gain machine 
independence.  No more idle users while we fix the machine that runs 
their software.)
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