Christian Affolter wrote:
If you're interested in gentoo (or any other OS/distribution) on
production server and you're going to manage more than 5-10 machines,
then you should think about building an "infrastructure" [5]. An
important part of your infrastructure, especially on a gentoo based one,
would be a build server or "gold server" which builds and provides
packages for your different end servers. Also consider to use a
versioning system at least for your config files.
(Late to the party, as usual...)
Yep, getting your /etc and other configuration files into a version
control system will keep you from tearing your hair out. Or wonder what
you had to change to make "XYZ" work properly. I find that keeping the
entire system in version control is too difficult to be worth it and
focus my efforts on VC'ing any file that I've edited (or would be likely
to edit). Takes about 15-30 minutes to get started (depending on how
familiar you are with Subversion or whatever VC system you use), but
easily saves you 30 minutes down the road.
Combine that with daily/weekly snapshots using hard links to another
disk on the system (or a remote disk) and you've got something really
easy to deal with. Remote backups are nice and secure, but sometimes
it's nice to have a quick-n-dirty browseable local partition with
snapshots of the O/S files.
...
Those two abilities are the primary reason that we're moving servers
over to Linux. It makes system administration and undoing minor "oops"
issues extremely easy. (The secondary reason is that we're moving to a
Xen-based infrastructure with SAN-based storage to gain machine
independence. No more idle users while we fix the machine that runs
their software.)
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