Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 26/09/2013 11:08, Grant wrote:
> I'm thinking of a different approach and I'm getting pretty excited.
> 
> I realized I only need two types of systems in my life.  One hosted
> server and bunch of identical laptops.  My laptop, my wife's laptop,
> our HTPC, routers, and office workstations could all be on identical
> hardware, and what better choice than a laptop?  Extremely
> space-efficient, portable, built-in UPS (battery), and no need to buy
> a separate monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, camera, etc.  Some
> systems will use all of that stuff and some will use none, but it's
> OK, laptops are getting cheap, and keyboard/mouse/video comes in handy
> once in a while on any system.

Laptops are a good choice, desktops are almost dead out there, and thin
clients nettops are just dead in the water for anything other than
appliances and media servers


> What if my laptop is the master system and I install any application
> that any of the other laptops need on my laptop and push its entire
> install to all of the other laptops via rsync whenever it changes?
> The only things that would vary by laptop would be users and
> configuration.

Could work, but don't push *your* laptop's config to all the other
laptops. they end up with your stuff which might not be what them to
have. Rather have a completely separate area where you store portage
configs, tree, packages and distfiles for laptops/clients and push from
there.

I'd recommend if you have a decent-ish desktop lying around, you press
that into service as your master build host. yeah, it takes 10% longer
to build stuff, but so what? Do it overnight.

>  Maybe puppet could help with that?  It would almost be
> like my own distro.  Some laptops would have stuff installed that they
> don't need but at least they aren't running Fedora! :)

Errr no. Do not do that. Do not use puppet for Gentoo systems. Let me
make that clear :-)

DO NOT PROVISION GENTOO SYSTEMS FROM PUPPET.

You will break things horribly and will curse the day you tried.
Basically, puppet and portage will get in each other's way and clobber
each other. Puppet has no concept of USE flags worth a damn, cannot
determine in advance what an ebuild will provide and the whole thing
breaks puppet's 100% deterministic model.

Puppet is designed to work awesomely well with binary distros, that is
where it excels. Keep within those constraints. Same goes for chef,
cfengine and various others things that accomplish the same end.


> If I can make this work I will basically only admin my laptop and
> hosted server no matter how large the office grows.  Huge time savings
> and huge scalability.  No multiseat required.  Please shoot this down!

Rather keep your laptop as your laptop with it's own setup, and
everything else as that own setup. You only need one small difference
between what you want your laptop to have, and everything else to have,
to crash that entire model.



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com