Andrew Kesterson wrote:

>     I've recently begun admining a few gentoo boxes in a distributed 
> setting (mainly boxes that my friends asked me to set up for them on a 
> personal, at-home basis.) I'm noticing that while portage makes 
> updates alot smoother, compiling them takes forever, especially on 
> initial installations. OpenOffice installs and updates are 
> particularly heinous.
>     How do you guys handle this? Do you configure all your systems the 
> same, and set up a binary package host on the system somewhere for 
> them to fetch binaries from? Or do you just use straight portage?

Hey Andrew.

In a number of instances, you are better off just using the binarys in 
portage for a standard desktop user. OpenOffice can take hours to 
compile.. or you can just install the binary in 5 mins, and the supposed 
loss of optimisation is unnoticable. openoffice-bin, mozilla-firefox-bin 
and mozilla-thunderbird-bin are always installed on my machine, and with 
the regularity of updates released on them, I'm thankful (and this is on 
an Athlon 64 3500.)

There is also azureus-bin, mplayer-bin, crossover-office-bin and a whole 
heap of others which could be useful in some places. I am very fond of 
use flags etc, but a lot of the time the defaults on these apps work 
fine, so its worth while.

If I were doing this, I would probably add things like kde, gnome, and X 
to package.mask (?) after installing, to "lock" them to the version 
you've installed. Then you can run "emerge -uavD world" jobs and not 
worry about it taking 15 hours. All you'd have to do is keep an eye out 
for bigger releases on the packages you've masked, and remember to 
update them (whether this be directly on Portage, DistCC, or some other 
method). It's a waste of time updating something like X just because a 
bugfux you're not affected by has been released, so just leave it until 
a substantial update comes out. It can also be useful to wait a couple 
of days after a release comes out, because you'll be snarling if you 
update a huge package on a dozen machines, and then a day later it gets 
updated again, or even revoked.

I'd also cron a once-weekly "emerge --quiet --sync && emerge -upvD 
world" to be emailed to you from each box. It will automate the syncing, 
and help you keep an eye on the updates.

Disclaimer: Most of my idea's relate directly to maintaining a 
workstation for someone else who isnt savvy enough to do it themselves, 
and therefore wont notice the small things.

Cheers
Jeremy


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