Re: [gentoo-server] Best practices in managing large server groups

[Ronan Mullally]

On Sun, 20 May 2007, Ramon van Alteren wrote:

> We''re using a combination of catalyst, pxe and the cli-installer from
> agaffney which we extended to support our configuration database.
> catalyst stage4 works fine for us and enables us to repeat build our
> system images. Additionally we use the packages generated by catalyst as
> input for our binary package server. We're currently looking into the
> tinderbox target to use catalyst to validate new packages on existing
> system images.

To add another string to this thread...

I've been using Gentoo on a small number of machines for several years.
Each server is managed individually with its own portage tree, etc.  None
of the boxes are true production boxes.

I've held off on using Gentoo in larger deployments because the idea of
putting a C compiler on a production box is just silly.  I've been meaning
to get to the bottom of this for a while, but never had the time
or incentive.

Does a multi-server gentoo install require a portage tree and gcc on
each box?  I know you can configure a BINHOST server in make.conf, but
that won't stop the install process requiring gcc as part of the profile.
Injecting a dummy stub for gcc will probably get around that, but I can't
see how removing the portage tree is possible.  Granted, in a large
deployment that's not really an issue, /usr/portage can be NFS-mounted
from a central source.  In a more distributed environment however (central
management server, widely distributed production servers) that's not
ideal.

I suspect they way around the gcc question is to use a profile which
doesn't have gcc as a base system dependancy.  Does such a profile exist,
or is does one have to roll their own?  Is there a way to run gentoo
without a portage tree on each box?


-Ronan
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