[gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Denis]

I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.

How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
two weeks?

How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
once a month or so?

The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
balance system administration with your "day job"?
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Mark Shields]

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On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
>
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
>
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
>
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
I sync and do an emerge -DNpvu world daily.  The results are e-mailed to me
by vixie-cron.  This allows me to read what new packages are available and
also see the updates available.  These logs are sent to my gmail address
with a label and filter.  If I am so inclined I can view the current one or
past ones.  I can then log into the box and run emerge -DNavu world and
update, then run etc-update after that.  The only thing that's been bugging
me is restarting services after they've been updated (automagically, or
near-auto).

-- 
- Mark Shields

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
>
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
>
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
>
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

I have a cron job that does emerge --sync and another that does
revdep-rebuild -p.  These email me their results.

At least once a week, I manually do
  emerge -aDvu world
Unless there's something particularly weird, I say "yes" when
it asks if I want the emerge.

I have the PORTAGE_NICENESS set to 15 in /etc/make.conf,
and since there are 4 hyperthreads on this machine, I also have
MAKEOPTS=-j4.  Together, these leave enough compute power
that I never really notice the load.  Besides, it's easy to start the
emerge at the end of the day.

At the end of the emerge, I run etc-update.  Each change I make
in a config file is tagged with a string that is easy to recognize.
If I have never modified a config file in the past, I accept all
changes -- I reason that if what the devs did the first time was
good enough, that is probably still true.  There are only about
a dozen packages that I made any changes to, so it's fairly easy
to keep up with things.

Most weeks I spend less than an hour on administration.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Ryan Sims]

On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
>
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
>
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

I have 2 gentoo boxes in our apartment(one's quiet since we just moved
and I haven't gotten back to it yet), I sync around once a week, and
-uDavN world when I sync.  If there are packages that look important
(gcc, glibc, baselayout, etc) I do a bit more research. I watch
gentoo.org and this list.  The only time I put off an update is if I
see notes about it on gentoo.org or such; things like the xorg modular
ebuilds, the new java system, etc.  I have portage email me the elog.

It's just me and my wife using the boxes, so I'm not as careful as I
would be were it a production server, but I've never really been
bitten, either.  As for balance with what I'm actually paid to do, if
I'm taken up with work, I don't update until I get some free time.

-- 
Ryan W Sims
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Albert Hopkins]

On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 10:01 -0400, Denis wrote:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "daily server."  Did you mean to
say "daily workstation"?  "Daily server" sounds more like a butler or
something.  My Gentoo setup is basically (daily) workstation which
doubles as a file server, a laptop, a MythTV station, and a Xen host
with various virtual machines.
> 
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?

This is really going to depend on the individual, being yourself.  The
only thing I can recommend is that you don't wait *too* long to
sync/upgrade as it's usually a pain.  Again, my setup:

Workstation: usually every day depending on my mood
Laptop: About once a month
MythBox: As needed (new release of Mythtv, etc)
Xen host: New version of Xen/Kernel
Xen guests: base image updated regularly, other guests as needed

> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?

Workstation: when available (except kernel.  I sometimes use bleeding
edge (using kernels not yet in portage) until something breaks and then
I get conservative.
Laptop: Once a month, or whenever next major release of GNOME is out
MythTv: don't worry about it that much.
Xen host: ditto, except for kernel
Xen guests: depends on what it's doing. If it's a web server, for
example, I try to keep up to date on apache. some guests have newer
versions of some packages masked because I require a certain version.
Try to not stay too far behind on Xen/Kernel but their releases are
infrequent anyway.

> 
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"? 

For some people system administration is their day job.  For others,
they save it at for evenings/weekends. :-). It really depends.  Is this
for your system at home (I'm still confused about the "daily server"
part)?  If it's for home then I'd imagine most people consider Gentoo
"administration" as a hobby and thus probably do it as often as any
other hobby.  If you mean at work, well I've only had one job where
Gentoo was used in the office (and there it was pretty much only for
workstations and "light" servers but in general most places I've seen do
updates on an "as needed" basis (i.e. security updates, updates that fix
a particular issue you're experiencing, etc.).  Of course a lot of the
big shops use "enterprise" solutions like Red Hat Network or Red
Carpet/Zenworks.

I don't think you're going to find a "hard" rule if that's what you're
looking for, but hopefully you'll get enough responses to be able to
come up with your own.

--
Albert W. Hopkins

-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Daniel Iliev]

On Tue, 29 May 2007 10:01:39 -0400
Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
> 
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
> 
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
> 
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?


I have a daily cron job containing:
===
emerge --sync      && \
emerge -DuNf world && \
glsa-check -t all 2>&1 | mail -s "GLSA report" root
===

In other words it syncs the tree, fetches all the new packages and then
checks for security vulnerabilities. If glsa-chack says "This system is
not affected by any of the listed GLSAs" I update when I have the time
(mostly in the weekends), otherwise I update ASAP.

-- 
Best regards,
Daniel

-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Roy Wright]

Daniel Iliev wrote:
> I have a daily cron job containing:
> ===
> emerge --sync      && \
> emerge -DuNf world && \
> glsa-check -t all 2>&1 | mail -s "GLSA report" root
> ===
>
> In other words it syncs the tree, fetches all the new packages and then
> checks for security vulnerabilities. If glsa-chack says "This system is
> not affected by any of the listed GLSAs" I update when I have the time
> (mostly in the weekends), otherwise I update ASAP.
>
>   

In addition to the above, my cron job also syncs my overlays, updates
eix database,
checks dependencies, and verifies nvidia driver was not updated behind
my back :-)

echo "Syncing overlays..."
/usr/bin/svn cleanup /usr/portage/local/layman/xeffects
layman -S

echo "Running update-eix..."
update-eix --quiet

echo "Running revdep-rebuild"
revdep-rebuild --ignore --pretend --no-color
rm -f /.revdep-rebuild.*

echo "show openGL selection"
eselect --no-color opengl list


So my daily routine is to check the email from cron, then as long as nothing
big needs to be updated, run emerge -uDNav where I examine the use flags,
particularly the not selected ones.  For big updates like kde and gcc, I
wait
for the weekend then check for any updating issues (b.g.o., forums, this
list).

HTH,
Roy
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Ralf Stephan]

You wrote 
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?

I have settled to a 5-day routine, when I sync, update completely
the system target, and go through the listing of changes to world,
where I only upgrade things important to me or those which have a
big gap in the version number or a new major number.

This doesn't cost me much personal and CPU time.


ralf

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Florian Philipp]

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Am Dienstag 29 Mai 2007 16:01 schrieb Denis:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
>
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
>
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
>
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?

I sync/update on Wednesday and Sunday using eix-sync instead of emerge-sync.

That way it shows me all changes on the tree together with a short description 
of the package. That way I find useful programs from time to time.

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Denis]

All these responses are very helpful - thanks for taking your time to reply!

Yea, my needs are pretty simple - just maintaining computational
workstations (one at home, one at work) - I am the primary user.  I am
not running any servers on either box.  I've never used cron - I
haven't felt the need to automate system administration in Gentoo any
more than what's already provided.  I keep marveling at emerge and the
portage system because it sure makes things easy on most occasions!!
I really don't have a problem running "emerge --pretend" by hand,
studying the output, and updating as needed.

My problem in the past was falling too far behind with the updates,
and now that I have fresh installs of Gentoo, I don't want to repeat
that.
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[kashani]

Denis wrote:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
> 
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
> 
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
> 
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?

	For the home samba server I update about once a year. My room mate 
updates the mythtv machine never. My vps instance with mail, web, etc 
does an eix-sync and glsa-check once a week and then I maybe emerge 
something once a month. I've been playing with Apache 2.2 lately which 
has been updating pretty quickly the last few weeks, but that's a bit of 
out of the ordinary.

kashani
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Tim Allinghan]

Denis wrote:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
>
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
>
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
>
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?
Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv 
-uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :)
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Denis]

On 5/29/07, Tim Allinghan <deserted@westnet.com.au> wrote:

> Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv
> -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :)

I'm sure that makes for particularly sweet dreams ;-)

One thing I've wondered about...  When you update X or nvidia drivers,
do you need to kill X before running emerge?

I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through
kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time.  I
guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not
always a safe thing to do.  Is it reasonably ok to wait for every
"major" 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every
minor 2.6.x.y release also?
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Ryan Sims]

On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/29/07, Tim Allinghan <deserted@westnet.com.au> wrote:
>
> > Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv
> > -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :)
>
> I'm sure that makes for particularly sweet dreams ;-)
>
> One thing I've wondered about...  When you update X or nvidia drivers,
> do you need to kill X before running emerge?

I've never done it *before* the emerge, but I usually restart after
the merge, like any other service.  Only time I've ever had a problem
with a program running while emerging is with a glibc upgrade a while
back screwing with a running Firefox, restarting Firefox solved
things.

> I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through
> kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time.  I
> guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not
> always a safe thing to do.  Is it reasonably ok to wait for every
> "major" 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every
> minor 2.6.x.y release also?

I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz > .config && make oldconfig'
consistently, never had a problem.  I always keep a working kernel in
grub.conf in case of screwups, and I read the options very carefully
before selecting.  One caveat:  going from 2.4 to 2.6 I reconfigured
by hand from scratch.  Whenever we get to 2.8 (or whatever the next
major release is), I'll do that again.

-- 
Ryan W Sims
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Michael Sullivan]

On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 22:20 -0400, Ryan Sims wrote:
> On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/29/07, Tim Allinghan <deserted@westnet.com.au> wrote:
> >
> > > Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv
> > > -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :)
> >
> > I'm sure that makes for particularly sweet dreams ;-)
> >
> > One thing I've wondered about...  When you update X or nvidia drivers,
> > do you need to kill X before running emerge?
> 
> I've never done it *before* the emerge, but I usually restart after
> the merge, like any other service.  Only time I've ever had a problem
> with a program running while emerging is with a glibc upgrade a while
> back screwing with a running Firefox, restarting Firefox solved
> things.
> 
> > I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through
> > kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time.  I
> > guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not
> > always a safe thing to do.  Is it reasonably ok to wait for every
> > "major" 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every
> > minor 2.6.x.y release also?
> 
> I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz > .config && make oldconfig'
> consistently, never had a problem.  I always keep a working kernel in
> grub.conf in case of screwups, and I read the options very carefully
> before selecting.  One caveat:  going from 2.4 to 2.6 I reconfigured
> by hand from scratch.  Whenever we get to 2.8 (or whatever the next
> major release is), I'll do that again.

If you wanted to shorten your command, I believe zcat does the exact
same thing as gunzip -c
-Michael Sullivan-
> 
> -- 
> Ryan W Sims

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Denis]

On 5/29/07, Ryan Sims <rwsims@gmail.com> wrote:

> I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz > .config && make oldconfig'
> consistently, never had a problem.  I always keep a working kernel in

Oh neat-o!  I didn't know there was a copy of the running config in /proc...

Does this basically just insert the current kernel configuration
inside the menuconfig interface of the new kernel as the starting
point?  How does this play with the new kernel options that have since
appeared or those that have been eliminated?  I suppose you still have
to check over every menu in the new kernel to make sure you're not
missing anything...
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Tue, 29 May 2007 23:05:56 -0400, Denis wrote:

> > I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz > .config && make oldconfig'
> > consistently, never had a problem.  I always keep a working kernel
> > in  
> 
> Oh neat-o!  I didn't know there was a copy of the running config
> in /proc...

It's an option you need to enable in the kernel, or you can copy .config
from your current kernel source directory.

> Does this basically just insert the current kernel configuration
> inside the menuconfig interface of the new kernel as the starting
> point?  How does this play with the new kernel options that have since
> appeared or those that have been eliminated?  I suppose you still have
> to check over every menu in the new kernel to make sure you're not
> missing anything...

That's what make oldconfig does, and prompts you for any new items.
There's no need to run menuconfig unless you want to change something.

Waiting for kernel version releases is not a good idea and the -r updates
generally include security fixes. Read the Changelog and decide whether
you need that particular update, some fixes only apply to certain
architectures. Like many others, I have a cron task that syncs then mails
the results of emerge -upvDN world to me, but I have added --changelog to
that command so the mail also contains the details of each update.

This runs in the early hours, so I can read it whenever it suits me during
the day and apply the changes as I want. I run testing, so frequent
updating is a good thing; with a stable system, weekly would be fine, but
the longer you leave it the more work is involved.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

"Time is the best teacher....., unfortunately it kills all the students"

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Eray Aslan]

On 30.05.2007 10:21, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> This runs in the early hours, so I can read it whenever it suits me during
> the day and apply the changes as I want. I run testing, so frequent
> updating is a good thing; with a stable system, weekly would be fine, but
> the longer you leave it the more work is involved.

I find that there are 2 problem-free approaches to updating.  Either you
update frequently or you "forklift" update the server, i.e. get the
server out of the server room and install a new machine.

-- 
Eray
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
> I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through
> kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time.  I
> guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not
> always a safe thing to do.  Is it reasonably ok to wait for every
> "major" 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every
> minor 2.6.x.y release also?

You can use the old .config safely if you "make oldconfig" before
anything else.  It will prompt you for replies to any new things,
and quietly ditch anything it doesn't recognize.  I've been doing this
for years.  I mostly reply "no" to all the prompts, but sometimes the
new stuff is interesting.

++ kevin


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Benno Schulenberg]

Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go
> > through kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that
> > takes some time.  I guess one can reuse the old .config file,
> > but I understand it's not always a safe thing to do.
>
> You can use the old .config safely if you "make oldconfig" before
> anything else.  It will prompt you for replies to any new things,
> and quietly ditch anything it doesn't recognize.

And this can ditch needed options when they get renamed or replaced, 
like happened with the netfilter stuff on the upgrade to 2.6.17, 
and with some IDE/ATA stuff on the upgrade to 2.6.20.  Just running 
'make oldconfig' on a 2.6.x to 2.6.y upgrade will not always give 
you a fully working kernel.

> > Is it reasonably ok to wait for every "major" 2.6.x release to
> > update, or is it necessary to update on every minor 2.6.x.y
> > release also?

If your kernel does everything you need and you are content with its 
performance, there's no need to upgrade to a new 2.6.y.  Just put a 
~sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.y into /etc/portage/package.mask and 
forget about it.  But the -rn upgrades for your current version you 
normally _do want to install because they fix serious bugs.  Often 
those bugs affect only specific hardware, but there's no harm in 
blindly upgrading: these little rev bumps _are safe.

Benno
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Denis]

I read the "man make.conf" and also the "make.conf.example".  Seems
pretty clear, except what is the "qa" option for the
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES variable?  And I assume the "info" option logs
all the green-star stuff at the end of emerge?
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 30 May 2007 13:20:13 -0400, Denis wrote:

> I read the "man make.conf" and also the "make.conf.example".  Seems
> pretty clear, except what is the "qa" option for the
> PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES variable?  And I assume the "info" option logs
> all the green-star stuff at the end of emerge?

qa = Quality Assurance, generally warnings about faulty ebuilds and meant
for developers. warn, error and log should be enough, info contains a lot
of trivial information.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Too many clicks spoil the browse.

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

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On Tuesday 29 May 2007 09:01:39 Denis wrote:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.

In server-land I would perform all upgrades on a test system before rolling to 
production anyway.

> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?

I sync, update system and world, and then revdep-rebuild daily.  I run ~amd64.
Unfortunately, this can get you into some sticky situations: my pdns still 
doesn't like my new postgres.

If you are running stable, it's much less likely to result in bad situations, 
and you should be able to put off upgrades much longer.  A daily (or weekly) 
sync is still a good idea IMHO; having an up-to-date tree is rarely a 
disadvantage.

> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?

I live on the edge and treat them like any other package.  Well, 'cept the 
kernel, which I only actually compile and reboot into occasionally.  If you 
don't have time to wrestle with issues, but off the upgrade.  Nothing sucks 
worse than not having the time to fix X, but needing it to work/play and 
having to broken.

-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.                     ,= ,-_-. =. 
bss03@volumehost.net                      ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy           `-'(. .)`-' 
http://iguanasuicide.org/                      \_/     

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Denis]

While we're on the subject of administration, I have a question about
emerge.  Sometimes emerge would display important information in green
or yellow stars after it's finished merging a package - such as
warnings or valuable tips.  However, if emerge is processing several
packages in a chain, it flashes that information for several seconds
and then moves right along to the next package, and usually I'm not
fast enough to read/remember it.  Can this information be retrieved?
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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 30 May 2007 00:37:16 -0400, Denis wrote:

> While we're on the subject of administration, I have a question about
> emerge.  Sometimes emerge would display important information in green
> or yellow stars after it's finished merging a package - such as
> warnings or valuable tips.  However, if emerge is processing several
> packages in a chain, it flashes that information for several seconds
> and then moves right along to the next package, and usually I'm not
> fast enough to read/remember it.  Can this information be retrieved?

Look at the PORTAGE_ELOG settings in man make.conf and
/etc/make.conf.example .


-- 
Neil Bothwick

He's so cool, he could get frostbite from masturbating.

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Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[John covici]

on Wednesday 05/30/2007 Denis(denis.che@gmail.com) wrote
 > While we're on the subject of administration, I have a question about
 > emerge.  Sometimes emerge would display important information in green
 > or yellow stars after it's finished merging a package - such as
 > warnings or valuable tips.  However, if emerge is processing several
 > packages in a chain, it flashes that information for several seconds
 > and then moves right along to the next package, and usually I'm not
 > fast enough to read/remember it.  Can this information be retrieved?
You can have it saved or mailed to you -- I did not know this for a
while, but it comes in handy -- also you can log the whole thing if
you set PORTAGE_LOGDIR -- for the full details look at
make.conf.example in /etc .

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com
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