On 25/09/2013 23:18, Grant wrote: > I'm trying to reduce the number of systems I spend time managing. My > previous plan was to set up multiseat on a small number of systems. > Now I'm wondering if it would be better to use multiple systems with > identical hardware and manage them in some sort of an optimized way so > that each set of identical hardware behaves as much like a single > machine as possible for management. I could use small SoC systems so > I don't have to worry about sourcing components later. Is there a > good tool or framework for this sort of thing?
The solution you pick depends heavily on how many of these identical machines you have. For some small-ish number (gut feel tells me up to around 10 or so), you could do what I do for my development vms[2]: - have 1 decent spec'ed machine as the master and buildhost - share /etc/portage/, $PORTDIR, /var/packages and /var/distfiles to all clients from some central location (NFS works really well for this) - for each package you want to have on a client, emerge it on the buildhost with the -b option (create binary packages) - emerge stuff on the clients with the -k (or possibly -K) option to use binary packages. Everything should show up in purple. If anything is a different colour, emerge that package on the buildhost and remerge it on the client. - for awesome street cred geek-points, install clusterssh and do all your clients in parallel[1] As long as you share important directories to each client, things stay consistent. What you essentially achieve is "build once-install many times" However, and I'm likely to get shot down for this here, I think you *really* need to reconsider whether Gentoo is even what you should be using for this. Put aside emotional attachments to your fav distro and take a long hard critical look at your pain-gain ratio. If all you really need is standard user-type gui stuffs on each client, what is Gentoo really buying you (other than the thrill of watching gcc output scroll by over and over and over....) Use gentoo by all means on your central server to get exactly the features you want (Gentoo's strong point), but ona bunch of regular clients... I dunno, Ubuntu or Fedora are hard to beat for that... [1] if you haven't played with clusterssh do yourself a favour and do so. there's something hugely awe-inspiring about typing cssh host1 host2 host3 host4 host5 host6 ... and watching 6 xterms pop up and all 6 run the same commands that you type into the controller window. [2] this sounds like I should take my own advice... but oddly Gentoo is ideal for how I use them. I can upgrade and downgrade almost any app to whatever version the developer says is on prod, and enable/disable USE to get the same feature set, and do it all in 10 minutes. No binary distro lets me do that :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
