Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
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]: Yes, under 10. - 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... 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. 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. 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! :) 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! - Grant
[gentoo-user] Continuous beeping with kernel 3.10 and 3.11
On one of my machines, I get continuous beeping from the internal loudspeaker when I boot a newer kernel (I'm using vanilla-sources). I first had that with 3.10.8 and also with 3.10.10, and it continues with 3.11.1. When I first had that problem I tried to remove all config options that had to do with the internal speaker, like CONFIG_HAVE_PCSPKR_PLATFORM CONFIG_PCSPKR_PLATFORM CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR but that didn't help. In the meantime I left the machine on long enough to discover that it stops beeping whenever it is idle long enough and blanks the display. Does that ring a bell with someone? Peter.
Re: [gentoo-user] Continuous beeping with kernel 3.10 and 3.11
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/26/13 16:42, Peter Weilbacher wrote: On one of my machines, I get continuous beeping from the internal loudspeaker when I boot a newer kernel (I'm using vanilla-sources). I first had that with 3.10.8 and also with 3.10.10, and it continues with 3.11.1. When I first had that problem I tried to remove all config options that had to do with the internal speaker, like CONFIG_HAVE_PCSPKR_PLATFORM CONFIG_PCSPKR_PLATFORM CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR but that didn't help. In the meantime I left the machine on long enough to discover that it stops beeping whenever it is idle long enough and blanks the display. Does that ring a bell with someone? Peter. Might be related with some kind of io error. What does dmesg show? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJSRDVzAAoJEK64IL1uI2halDIH/AmzSsD6HtZSX3GkeV15x5Jt 1q3YnQXygTteaOKyGM2DpxGU9RbSNho9PWjNlIm1mldTnSDJEjjuOen9WVvDjhtB M4KrQ4hbx7nDjzOWVSi5H9OvhdH3EinzEdlUi2X9JUalrC7S3PSTYA3HPdt9r37B rxhn8IShV8+e/jy+CIJCKXjRCDpaj1r8HvU/yLqv66WmhDoOItb3azBx8YcMGPbr zFzB5HKbi4MhZOnxZwYEsyimgP++akp/La4Zx0wnQ8/oEy6D1k6MbqpDzPaKJL69 7W6l2LSLwIg/gdjN8xqXxsUdZJDDMe4QoqFFwlxko0Q7/cK4DgO4OZy96VQT9Xs= =nudQ -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-user] Continuous beeping with kernel 3.10 and 3.11
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 02:42:59PM +0200, Peter Weilbacher wrote: On one of my machines, I get continuous beeping from the internal loudspeaker when I boot a newer kernel (I'm using vanilla-sources). I first had that with 3.10.8 and also with 3.10.10, and it continues with 3.11.1. When I first had that problem I tried to remove all config options that had to do with the internal speaker, like CONFIG_HAVE_PCSPKR_PLATFORM CONFIG_PCSPKR_PLATFORM CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR but that didn't help. In the meantime I left the machine on long enough to discover that it stops beeping whenever it is idle long enough and blanks the display. Does that ring a bell with someone? Peter. Check the manual for your BIOS/motherboard to see if it's some indication of hardware failure. -- Happy Penguin Computers ') 126 Fenco Drive ( \ Tupelo, MS 38801 ^^ supp...@happypenguincomputers.com 662-269-2706 662-205-6424 http://happypenguincomputers.com/ A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting
Re: [gentoo-user] trouble downgrading systemd and virtual/udev
On Wed, Sep 25 2013, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:00 PM, gottl...@nyu.edu wrote: On Wed, Sep 25 2013, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: Don't mask anything, just make sure that systemd (both virtual/ and sys-apps/) is not on package.keywords. This system is ~amd64 (I should have said that earlier). I would create /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/systemd and put in it two lines -~sys-apps/systemd -~virtual/udev No, I thought you were in amd64, not ~amd64. If you are in ~amd64, putting things in /etc/portage/package.keywords should be useless. Actually that is not correct. Note the - before the ~. I read man portage and found out about this (see below). It mentions running mostly stable and mostly unstable. Mixing amd64 and ~amd64 is not supported; it usually works if you are in amd64, and you only keyword some select packages: that's the way I use GNOME 3.8, soon 3.10, in an otherwise stable system. It is true that the primary reason for my using testing is for gnome-3. My long term goal is to go to stable for my main system. But, of course, that takes quite a bit of time to let the unstable packages die off (or quite a bit of effort to force the downgrades). If you are trying to downgrade systemd for the problems related to GNOME and logind in 206, I'm happy to report that version 207 (available since Sep 14) solves everything; at least in my desktop and laptop. You should try it. I am running sys-apps/systemd-207-r2. Booting has become MUCH worse. I will send details to you off list. thanks again for your continual help, allan man portage extract package.accept_keywords and package.keywords Per-package ACCEPT_KEYWORDS. Useful for mixing unstable packages in with a normally stable system or vice versa. This will allow ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to be augmented for a single package. [snip] Example: # always use unstable libgd media-libs/libgd ~x86 # only use stable mplayer media-video/mplayer -~x86
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
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.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
Hi Alan, On 26.09.2013 22:42, Alan McKinnon wrote: 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. Did you try to combine one of these solutions with portage's binary package feature? With --usepkgonly gentoo is more or less a binary distro. I'm thinking of using a single use flag set for 20+ Gentoo servers to get rid of compiling large packages in the live environment. Regards, Johann
Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware
On 27/09/2013 06:33, Johann Schmitz wrote: Hi Alan, On 26.09.2013 22:42, Alan McKinnon wrote: 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. Did you try to combine one of these solutions with portage's binary package feature? With --usepkgonly gentoo is more or less a binary distro. I'm thinking of using a single use flag set for 20+ Gentoo servers to get rid of compiling large packages in the live environment. binpkgs don't turn gentoo into a binary distro, they turn it into something resembling a Unix from the 90s with pkgadd - using dumb tarballs with no metadata and no room to make choices. Puppet fails at that as the intelligence cannot happen in puppet, it has to happen in portage. If the binpkg doesn't match what package.* says, puppet is stuck and portage falls back to building locally. The result is worse than the worst binary distro. By all means use a central use set, it's what I do for my dev VMs and it works out well for me. Just remember to run emerge on each machine individually. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
