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

[Charles Duffy <cduffy@spamcop.net>]

Thank you for your advice. It's good to hear that someone else is in a 
similar scenario.

The only thing that's going to be a hard sell around here is Catalyst -- 
our senior sysadmin (who is a considerably more seasoned Gentoo user 
than myself) has taken the position that using Catalyst is unnecessary 
and that emerge (targeting a chroot, with appropriate FEATURES set to 
generate binary packages) should be adequate. He's not immovable on such 
things -- but I'll need to have a very solid understanding of the 
benefits of using Catalyst before arguing any case to the contrary. 
(I've also contacted the author of gentoo-buildhoster to find out why he 
abandoned it, what he's using in its place, and whether he believes the 
project to be worth picking up; if he believes catalyst-2 to be more 
suitable for his use cases, understanding the reasoning behind that 
decision may provide some powerful arguments).

Much of your other advice (ie. quickstart) is completely in line with 
our preexisting plans; thanks again for answering. (As for some of the 
items you're curious about -- such as our staff-to-server ratio -- I'm 
not entirely comfortable discussing all of that on an archived list; 
perhaps on IRC).
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