[gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo for many servers

[Andreas Niederl <rico32@gmx.net>]

Alex Schuster wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 
>> clusterssh will let you log into many machines at once and run emerge
>>  -avuND world everywhere
> 
> This is way cool. I just started using it on eight Fedora servers I am 
> administrating. Nice, now this is an improvement over my 'for $h in 
> $HOSTS; do ssh $h "yum install foo"; done' approach.

You could have a look at app-admin/puppet [1][2] which supposedly takes
car of these things.


[...]
> Now I am thinking about a Gentoo installation instead.
> 
> Pros:
>  - Continuous updates, no downtime for upgrading, only when I decide to 
> install a new kernel. This is really really cool. I fear the upgrade from 
> Fedora 10 to 12 which has to be done soon.

>  - Some improvement in speed. Those machines do A LOT of numbercrunching, 
> which jobs often lasting for days, so even small improvements would be 
> nice.
>  - Easier debugging. When things do not work, I think it's easier to dig 
> into the problem. No fancy, but sometimes buggy GUIs hiding basic 
> functionality.

These two things would probably be your best selling points for your idea.


>  - Heck, Gentoo is _cooler_ than typical distributions. And emerging with 
> distcc on about 8*4 cores would be fun :)

Being 'cool' doesn't count, at least last time I looked.


>  - I am probably the only one who can administrate them.

That is a huge disadvantage.


> Cons:
>  - If something will not work with this not so common (meta)distribution, 
> people will say "always trouble with your Gentoo Schmentoo, it works fine 
> in Fedora". Fedora is more mainstream, if something does not work there, 
> then it's okay for the people to accept it.
>  - I fear that big packages like Matlab are made for and tested on the 
> typical distributions, and may have problems with the not-so-common 
> Gentoo. I think someone here just had such a problem with Mathematica 
> (which we do currently not use).
[...]

If you're using commercial software which is only supported by Redhat,
Novell, etc. then you should think twice about replacing it.

But I'm guessing that those packages don't have to be installed on every
machine.
So, I'd suggest that you use Gentoo on those boxes where you'd have the
biggest advantage using it and no or minimal disadvantages.


>  - I am probably the only one who can administrate them. I think Gentoo is 
> easier to maintain in the long run, but only when you take the time to 
> learn it. With Fedora, you do not need much more than the 'yum install' 
> command. There is no need to read complicated X.org upgrade guides and 
> such.
[...]

Please do your colleagues and successors a favor and document your whole
setup really good.


Regards,
Andi

[1] http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/
[2] http://log.onthebrink.de/2008/05/using-puppet-on-gentoo.html