2007/2/13, Daniel van Ham Colchete <daniel.colchete@gmail.com>:
>
> Hello everyone!!!!
>
> Here on my company we are going to start deploying Gentoo Linux on our
> customers. Every server will have the very same installed packages,
> the very same use flags, very same cflags, only a few configurations
> will differ.
>
> I would like the deployment and maintenance to be done as easily as
> possible because this project needs to be scalable to more than 100
> servers. Although we are going to install only 10 servers in the
> beginning, my boss says that I should be prepared for this number to
> grow.
>
> Yesterday I found about the SCIRE project that seems to solve my
> problems easily. But it seems that the project's development is
> stopped. Unfortunately, I don't know a thing of Phyton, so I can't
> help. Do anyone know how is the project going? Are we going to have a
> production usable release? If so, when? It's not like I'm pushing
> anything, I just want to know if I can count on it or not.
>
> Setting the project aside, I'm thinking about developing my own
> installer to install a catalyst's stage4 and reboot a working Gentoo.
> After that I'm thinking about using emerge with binary packages to
> install updates automatically. What do you think? Will it work? Is it
> possible to rollback an update if something goes wrong?


We're working on womething similar using catalyst [1] to create a custom
livecd, quickstart [2] to automate installation of a basic working system
from that livecd and puppet (already mentioned in the thread) to automate
administration from that point.


To solve the problem with incompatible configuration files, everytime
> I upgrade anything, a perl script will reconfigure the customers
> server.
>

I recommend to use an existing solution (puppet, cfengine, there are other
out there) instead of developing a custom tool to keep configuration up to
date.

Best regards
Jose

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/catalyst/
[2] http://agaffney.org/quickstart/