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

[Ramon van Alteren <ramon@vanalteren.nl>]

Charles Duffy wrote:
> Thank you for your advice. It's good to hear that someone else is in a 
> similar scenario.
It's likewise nice to hear someone is planning the same as we do.
> 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).
Well, basically he's right. Catalyst is a build tool that wraps all the 
stuff you need to do when building packages in a chroot, with some 
additional features
You don't need it.... it just saves time and a lot of work writing your 
own scripts to manage the environment, and it's semi-maintained.

OTOH you lose flexibility, need to invest time in learning how catalyst 
works etc.
Catalyst-1 is completely unusable for building system-images, this is a 
feature that catalyst gained with the -2 release.
Catalyst has gained quite a community of users by now, who keep bugging 
Chris for features and explaination, you can find them on gentoo-catalyst.

The benefit of using catalyst for us is that it solves two wishes in one 
fell swoop:
* an automated and repeatable system image build tool
* a binary package generator for specified system images

Additionally we're looking into using the tinderbox target to validate 
builds on top of our different server images.
> 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).
OK, that's cool, we've been thinking of generalizing the changes we did 
to quickstart to get it to talk to our inventory system and submitting 
them back to agaffney.
If somebody finds the time to do the work, that is. I would be very 
curious about the inventory system you are planning, if you're willing 
to shed some light on that I'd be grateful.

Ramon

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