Re: [gentoo-server] Managing multiple servers.

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

Hi,

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:21, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 14:37, Ramon van Alteren <ramon@vanalteren.nl> wrote:
>> This list seems to have woken up suddenly again, good news :)
> About time, I should say...

Yeah :)
>
> There have been.... let's say, 'doubts' as to the suitability of
> Gentoo as servers.

And they are well-founded in many cases IMHO, not many shops have the
expertise and the guts to deal with a moving target such as the
portage tree is and it will bite them eventually. On top of that I
think there are very few shops that need the flexibility and
malleability of gentoo. So that seems like a nice fit.

I have always viewed gentoo as a developers distro which allows you to
stay on the bleeding edge with as little effort as possible. If you do
not need that functionality, use *fill in favorite distro name here*

>> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 00:12, la Bigmac <la_bigmac@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> While I have a central emerge server (rsync) and sync all of my servers to
>>> it I still manually update the packages.
>>>
>>> Example, openssh how should I be updating openssh on all of my servers other
>>> than logging onto each one in turn and running emerge openssh.
>>
>> Puppet takes care of that for us and this is a major relief,  having
>> useflag support in the puppet gentoo package provider would be nice,
>> but not really necessary. I'd prefer having useflag awareness in
>> binpkgs and the ability to produce different binpkgs for different
>> useflag sets in portage.
>
> So, do you think it will be wise to create a management tool
> explicitly for Gentoo (with its quirks such as ~masks, USE flags,
> portage/env, and so-on), or just rely on Puppet?

No, i think it would pay off to take a look at adding a specific
provider in puppet for portage that exposes more of the unique
functionality of portage to the puppet manifest writer.

Ramon van Alteren
Senior System Engineer Hyves.nl