Joe Rizzo wrote:
I am looking at deploying a large scale installation of systems running Gentoo. (Large scale being 200-300 systems) Currently, I am mainly concerned with how to handle portage and packages.
<snip> >
Please provide experience or ideas on: 1) Creating and maintaining a minimal gentoo image?
I'll leave this one to those with experience, but I'll at least offer the advise of "test test test!" ;)
2) Managing portage and packages for a large scale gentoo environment?
Although it pains me to say it, I'd suggest not using emerge's remote binary package feature. Instead, you'd be much safer to rsync the binary packages as well and use portage with the local package repository. To be quite honest, that particular feature in it's current implementation is basically unmaintained and has several obscure bugs that hit often. This will be rectified in the next major portage release, but until then the ideas and methods you outlined would be your best bet.
As for the actual rolling out of upgrades and configuration changes, I've heard many people rave about cfengine. I believe it is used extensively throughout gentoo's own infrastructure as well. I haven't spent the time to learn it myself yet though so can't offer any advice beyond that either.
Regards, Jason Stubbs -- [email protected] mailing list
