Re: [gentoo-server] strategies for upgrading packages in a large cluster of machines

[Andrea Barisani]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 02:51:47PM -0400, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> All --
>
> Curious what various suggestions you can offer for the following problem:
>
> I have a large cluster of machines that I will be building using Gentoo.  I
> will be using partimage for the initial installation (build one gold server
> and clone the rest from it) and cfengine for ongoing configuration
> management of things like /etc/ files, etc.
>
> The one area I'm stuck on is how to manage package upgrades.  I don't want
> to have to run 'emerge -u world' on each machine.  In fact, I don't want to
> have to compile things on each machine.  Ideally, I want to only have to
> upgrade one machine and have those changes propogate out automatically to
> the other machines from there.  (All hardware will be identical)
>
> I've looked at rdist, but I've never used that before, so I'm not sure how
> well it would work.
>
> Another suggestion was maintaining a custom portage tree and running a
> nightly 'emerge -u --usepkg world' on all the boxes.  Then, by making a
> change to the portage tree (which the other servers would sync from), it
> would propogate out to the servers automatically the next time the cron job
> ran.  This is an option and probably the best one I have at this point, but
> it seems somewhat fragile -- one slip-up in the portage tree and I'm hosed.
> This also wouldn't work for installing new kernels

Ok, I've already responded privately to Kurt but I think it's best
republishing this link to the list in case someone it's interested. :)

Here [1] you'll find a summary on how I'm managing Gentoo on a 35 hosts 
installation.

I've found that maintaining a single gold server and using 'emerge -k' to
propagate updates it's the best way. Of course something (like kernel and
baselayout) must be done manually (however I've got a separate procedure for conf files and
kernel is copied with them).

I've also found that at times portage lost track of some packages in
/var/cache/edb/world however having only a few 'gold' images to mantain you
can forget about db consistency on the clients since 'emerge -k' of an update
doesn't look at it. You can possibly forget about portage and simply issue a
tar -xvjf /packages/All/update.tbz2 I guess...

A simple script that parses and confront `epm -q -a|sort` output is used to
check package consistency between clients.

Bye

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.sysadmin/65/match=keep+sanity

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