Tonight at SLUG I mentioned the broader issues of the disciplines and practices involved in running a production platform. One of the fundamental pieces of background knowledge that's an important and canonical reference is a paper called "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure", which more or less established the notion of "gold server". Available as an living online document at http://www.infrastructures.org/
++ <plug shameless="yes"> For what it's worth, if you're interested in Gentoo packaging, I wrote an article on the topic that appeared in Linux Journal. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7438 It's written somewhat deliberately to give non-Gentoo users who have some idea of the experience of packages and administering their own Linux distro an idea of the interesting ways that Gentoo has approached the problem space. There's a PDF of the article in it's original form on my site - IMHO it's typeset a little better :) Enjoy. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/articles/GentooUnusual/GentooForAllTheUnusualResaons_Article.pdf </plug> AfC Sydney -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Technology strategy, managing change, establishing procedures, and executing successful upgrades to mission critical business infrastructure. http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ Sydney New York Toronto London -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
