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 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
