I believe you will still need a tree either way.

I would just have the master server share it's portage tree over nfs, and then when you update the nodes of the cluster, just mount the nfs share, run your emerge system or world or whatever, and then when you are finished umount the nfs share.

I imagine this could be done easily via scripts, complete with error checking for bad mounts bad emerges etc.

Ronan Mullally wrote:

Hi Karl,

On Mon, 21 May 2007, Karl Holz wrote:

Is there a way to run gentoo without a portage tree on each box?

yes, if  you setup a build system, using a stage3 tarball, and build your
system into a directory. Portage will only be under your /usr/portage and not
into the system image you're building. the good thing about using a Stage3
tarball is you can build you system on any linux system, build your system
image, tarball the image, deploy and install grub on x86, yaboot on Mac PPC,
silo on Sparc64.


How are updates handled?  "emerge -uD <pkg|world>" isn't going to work
without a portage tree, so I presume I'd need to tell each server which
packages need to be updated with "emerge <pkg1> <pkg2> ... <pkgn>" to have
it download them from the binhost?


-Ronan