Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Tue, 29 May 2007 23:05:56 -0400, Denis wrote: I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz .config make oldconfig' consistently, never had a problem. I always keep a working kernel in Oh neat-o! I didn't know there was a copy of the running config in /proc... It's an option you need to enable in the kernel, or you can copy .config from your current kernel source directory. Does this basically just insert the current kernel configuration inside the menuconfig interface of the new kernel as the starting point? How does this play with the new kernel options that have since appeared or those that have been eliminated? I suppose you still have to check over every menu in the new kernel to make sure you're not missing anything... That's what make oldconfig does, and prompts you for any new items. There's no need to run menuconfig unless you want to change something. Waiting for kernel version releases is not a good idea and the -r updates generally include security fixes. Read the Changelog and decide whether you need that particular update, some fixes only apply to certain architectures. Like many others, I have a cron task that syncs then mails the results of emerge -upvDN world to me, but I have added --changelog to that command so the mail also contains the details of each update. This runs in the early hours, so I can read it whenever it suits me during the day and apply the changes as I want. I run testing, so frequent updating is a good thing; with a stable system, weekly would be fine, but the longer you leave it the more work is involved. -- Neil Bothwick Time is the best teacher., unfortunately it kills all the students signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Wed, 30 May 2007 00:37:16 -0400, Denis wrote: While we're on the subject of administration, I have a question about emerge. Sometimes emerge would display important information in green or yellow stars after it's finished merging a package - such as warnings or valuable tips. However, if emerge is processing several packages in a chain, it flashes that information for several seconds and then moves right along to the next package, and usually I'm not fast enough to read/remember it. Can this information be retrieved? Look at the PORTAGE_ELOG settings in man make.conf and /etc/make.conf.example . -- Neil Bothwick He's so cool, he could get frostbite from masturbating. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
on Wednesday 05/30/2007 Denis([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote While we're on the subject of administration, I have a question about emerge. Sometimes emerge would display important information in green or yellow stars after it's finished merging a package - such as warnings or valuable tips. However, if emerge is processing several packages in a chain, it flashes that information for several seconds and then moves right along to the next package, and usually I'm not fast enough to read/remember it. Can this information be retrieved? You can have it saved or mailed to you -- I did not know this for a while, but it comes in handy -- also you can log the whole thing if you set PORTAGE_LOGDIR -- for the full details look at make.conf.example in /etc . -- Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is: How do you spend it? John Covici [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 30.05.2007 10:21, Neil Bothwick wrote: This runs in the early hours, so I can read it whenever it suits me during the day and apply the changes as I want. I run testing, so frequent updating is a good thing; with a stable system, weekly would be fine, but the longer you leave it the more work is involved. I find that there are 2 problem-free approaches to updating. Either you update frequently or you forklift update the server, i.e. get the server out of the server room and install a new machine. -- Eray -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
Kevin O'Gorman wrote: On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time. I guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not always a safe thing to do. You can use the old .config safely if you make oldconfig before anything else. It will prompt you for replies to any new things, and quietly ditch anything it doesn't recognize. And this can ditch needed options when they get renamed or replaced, like happened with the netfilter stuff on the upgrade to 2.6.17, and with some IDE/ATA stuff on the upgrade to 2.6.20. Just running 'make oldconfig' on a 2.6.x to 2.6.y upgrade will not always give you a fully working kernel. Is it reasonably ok to wait for every major 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every minor 2.6.x.y release also? If your kernel does everything you need and you are content with its performance, there's no need to upgrade to a new 2.6.y. Just put a ~sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.y into /etc/portage/package.mask and forget about it. But the -rn upgrades for your current version you normally _do want to install because they fix serious bugs. Often those bugs affect only specific hardware, but there's no harm in blindly upgrading: these little rev bumps _are safe. Benno -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
I read the man make.conf and also the make.conf.example. Seems pretty clear, except what is the qa option for the PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES variable? And I assume the info option logs all the green-star stuff at the end of emerge? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Wed, 30 May 2007 13:20:13 -0400, Denis wrote: I read the man make.conf and also the make.conf.example. Seems pretty clear, except what is the qa option for the PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES variable? And I assume the info option logs all the green-star stuff at the end of emerge? qa = Quality Assurance, generally warnings about faulty ebuilds and meant for developers. warn, error and log should be enough, info contains a lot of trivial information. -- Neil Bothwick Too many clicks spoil the browse. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. 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? 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? 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? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list I sync and do an emerge -DNpvu world daily. The results are e-mailed to me by vixie-cron. This allows me to read what new packages are available and also see the updates available. These logs are sent to my gmail address with a label and filter. If I am so inclined I can view the current one or past ones. I can then log into the box and run emerge -DNavu world and update, then run etc-update after that. The only thing that's been bugging me is restarting services after they've been updated (automagically, or near-auto). -- - Mark Shields
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. 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? 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? 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? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list I have a cron job that does emerge --sync and another that does revdep-rebuild -p. These email me their results. At least once a week, I manually do emerge -aDvu world Unless there's something particularly weird, I say yes when it asks if I want the emerge. I have the PORTAGE_NICENESS set to 15 in /etc/make.conf, and since there are 4 hyperthreads on this machine, I also have MAKEOPTS=-j4. Together, these leave enough compute power that I never really notice the load. Besides, it's easy to start the emerge at the end of the day. At the end of the emerge, I run etc-update. Each change I make in a config file is tagged with a string that is easy to recognize. If I have never modified a config file in the past, I accept all changes -- I reason that if what the devs did the first time was good enough, that is probably still true. There are only about a dozen packages that I made any changes to, so it's fairly easy to keep up with things. Most weeks I spend less than an hour on administration. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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? 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? 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? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list I have 2 gentoo boxes in our apartment(one's quiet since we just moved and I haven't gotten back to it yet), I sync around once a week, and -uDavN world when I sync. If there are packages that look important (gcc, glibc, baselayout, etc) I do a bit more research. I watch gentoo.org and this list. The only time I put off an update is if I see notes about it on gentoo.org or such; things like the xorg modular ebuilds, the new java system, etc. I have portage email me the elog. It's just me and my wife using the boxes, so I'm not as careful as I would be were it a production server, but I've never really been bitten, either. As for balance with what I'm actually paid to do, if I'm taken up with work, I don't update until I get some free time. -- Ryan W Sims -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
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
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Tue, 29 May 2007 10:01:39 -0400 Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. 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? 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? 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? I have a daily cron job containing: === emerge --sync \ emerge -DuNf world \ glsa-check -t all 21 | mail -s GLSA report root === In other words it syncs the tree, fetches all the new packages and then checks for security vulnerabilities. If glsa-chack says This system is not affected by any of the listed GLSAs I update when I have the time (mostly in the weekends), otherwise I update ASAP. -- Best regards, Daniel -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 09:48 -0500, Albert Hopkins wrote: 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. ... and I'm even less certain how I read that as daily server. I apologize for having responded before taking my medication. -- Albert W. Hopkins -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
Daniel Iliev wrote: I have a daily cron job containing: === emerge --sync \ emerge -DuNf world \ glsa-check -t all 21 | mail -s GLSA report root === In other words it syncs the tree, fetches all the new packages and then checks for security vulnerabilities. If glsa-chack says This system is not affected by any of the listed GLSAs I update when I have the time (mostly in the weekends), otherwise I update ASAP. In addition to the above, my cron job also syncs my overlays, updates eix database, checks dependencies, and verifies nvidia driver was not updated behind my back :-) echo Syncing overlays... /usr/bin/svn cleanup /usr/portage/local/layman/xeffects layman -S echo Running update-eix... update-eix --quiet echo Running revdep-rebuild revdep-rebuild --ignore --pretend --no-color rm -f /.revdep-rebuild.* echo show openGL selection eselect --no-color opengl list So my daily routine is to check the email from cron, then as long as nothing big needs to be updated, run emerge -uDNav where I examine the use flags, particularly the not selected ones. For big updates like kde and gcc, I wait for the weekend then check for any updating issues (b.g.o., forums, this list). HTH, Roy -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
You wrote 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? I have settled to a 5-day routine, when I sync, update completely the system target, and go through the listing of changes to world, where I only upgrade things important to me or those which have a big gap in the version number or a new major number. This doesn't cost me much personal and CPU time. ralf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
Am Dienstag 29 Mai 2007 16:01 schrieb Denis: 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. 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? 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? 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? I sync/update on Wednesday and Sunday using eix-sync instead of emerge-sync. That way it shows me all changes on the tree together with a short description of the package. That way I find useful programs from time to time. pgpCzye3jjWaW.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
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. 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? 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? 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 the home samba server I update about once a year. My room mate updates the mythtv machine never. My vps instance with mail, web, etc does an eix-sync and glsa-check once a week and then I maybe emerge something once a month. I've been playing with Apache 2.2 lately which has been updating pretty quickly the last few weeks, but that's a bit of out of the ordinary. kashani -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
All these responses are very helpful - thanks for taking your time to reply! Yea, my needs are pretty simple - just maintaining computational workstations (one at home, one at work) - I am the primary user. I am not running any servers on either box. I've never used cron - I haven't felt the need to automate system administration in Gentoo any more than what's already provided. I keep marveling at emerge and the portage system because it sure makes things easy on most occasions!! I really don't have a problem running emerge --pretend by hand, studying the output, and updating as needed. My problem in the past was falling too far behind with the updates, and now that I have fresh installs of Gentoo, I don't want to repeat that. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
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. 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? 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? 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? Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Tim Allinghan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :) I'm sure that makes for particularly sweet dreams ;-) One thing I've wondered about... When you update X or nvidia drivers, do you need to kill X before running emerge? I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time. I guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not always a safe thing to do. Is it reasonably ok to wait for every major 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every minor 2.6.x.y release also? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/29/07, Tim Allinghan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :) I'm sure that makes for particularly sweet dreams ;-) One thing I've wondered about... When you update X or nvidia drivers, do you need to kill X before running emerge? I've never done it *before* the emerge, but I usually restart after the merge, like any other service. Only time I've ever had a problem with a program running while emerging is with a glibc upgrade a while back screwing with a running Firefox, restarting Firefox solved things. I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time. I guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not always a safe thing to do. Is it reasonably ok to wait for every major 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every minor 2.6.x.y release also? I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz .config make oldconfig' consistently, never had a problem. I always keep a working kernel in grub.conf in case of screwups, and I read the options very carefully before selecting. One caveat: going from 2.4 to 2.6 I reconfigured by hand from scratch. Whenever we get to 2.8 (or whatever the next major release is), I'll do that again. -- Ryan W Sims -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 22:20 -0400, Ryan Sims wrote: On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/29/07, Tim Allinghan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Last thing before I hop off each night, emerge --sync followed by a -pv -uDN world, if I'm happy I fire it up and head to bed :) I'm sure that makes for particularly sweet dreams ;-) One thing I've wondered about... When you update X or nvidia drivers, do you need to kill X before running emerge? I've never done it *before* the emerge, but I usually restart after the merge, like any other service. Only time I've ever had a problem with a program running while emerging is with a glibc upgrade a while back screwing with a running Firefox, restarting Firefox solved things. I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time. I guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not always a safe thing to do. Is it reasonably ok to wait for every major 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every minor 2.6.x.y release also? I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz .config make oldconfig' consistently, never had a problem. I always keep a working kernel in grub.conf in case of screwups, and I read the options very carefully before selecting. One caveat: going from 2.4 to 2.6 I reconfigured by hand from scratch. Whenever we get to 2.8 (or whatever the next major release is), I'll do that again. If you wanted to shorten your command, I believe zcat does the exact same thing as gunzip -c -Michael Sullivan- -- Ryan W Sims -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Ryan Sims [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I use 'gunzip -c /proc/config.gz .config make oldconfig' consistently, never had a problem. I always keep a working kernel in Oh neat-o! I didn't know there was a copy of the running config in /proc... Does this basically just insert the current kernel configuration inside the menuconfig interface of the new kernel as the starting point? How does this play with the new kernel options that have since appeared or those that have been eliminated? I suppose you still have to check over every menu in the new kernel to make sure you're not missing anything... -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On 5/29/07, Denis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I usually dread kernel updates because then I have to go through kernel menuconfig all over again, and for me, that takes some time. I guess one can reuse the old .config file, but I understand it's not always a safe thing to do. Is it reasonably ok to wait for every major 2.6.x release to update, or is it necessary to update on every minor 2.6.x.y release also? You can use the old .config safely if you make oldconfig before anything else. It will prompt you for replies to any new things, and quietly ditch anything it doesn't recognize. I've been doing this for years. I mostly reply no to all the prompts, but sometimes the new stuff is interesting. ++ kevin -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
On Tuesday 29 May 2007 09:01:39 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. In server-land I would perform all upgrades on a test system before rolling to production anyway. How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it your versions in world? I sync, update system and world, and then revdep-rebuild daily. I run ~amd64. Unfortunately, this can get you into some sticky situations: my pdns still doesn't like my new postgres. If you are running stable, it's much less likely to result in bad situations, and you should be able to put off upgrades much longer. A daily (or weekly) sync is still a good idea IMHO; having an up-to-date tree is rarely a disadvantage. How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and system tool chain? I live on the edge and treat them like any other package. Well, 'cept the kernel, which I only actually compile and reboot into occasionally. If you don't have time to wrestle with issues, but off the upgrade. Nothing sucks worse than not having the time to fix X, but needing it to work/play and having to broken. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/ pgp07TFMJOymi.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?
While we're on the subject of administration, I have a question about emerge. Sometimes emerge would display important information in green or yellow stars after it's finished merging a package - such as warnings or valuable tips. However, if emerge is processing several packages in a chain, it flashes that information for several seconds and then moves right along to the next package, and usually I'm not fast enough to read/remember it. Can this information be retrieved? -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
