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Hello everybody, |
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I have a compliment of older x86 and amd64 boxes that I use for |
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testing things; new or specialized gentoo offerings and such. Mostly amd64. |
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Many of the older ide/ata drive systems have front loaded carriers |
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that have quick hot swap feature that make it easy to shut down |
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a machine. Swap the hardrive (and carrier cassette) and boot up |
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with a differnt OS for testing. Often I use one machine to work |
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on several differnet problems. I try to avoid the VM approach, |
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because much of what I work on involves actual hardware issues |
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and hardware verifications. |
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I could put a minimal distro, such as system rescure, on to a usb stick, |
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CD/DVD for booting, mount the drive and dd over complete images |
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from various places, then a quick reboot to test a drive based distro. |
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I have many differnt such gyrations ongoing and I need to deploy |
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a singular semanctic for boot a myriad of offering to test/code on. |
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To just name a few: pentoo, lilblue, lxqt(4), lxqt(5), wrt, |
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embedded gentoo etc etc etc. It seems as though each is a "walk_once" |
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exercise and I'm loosing my mind. Throw on top of this, BTRFS, CEPTh |
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gluster, xfs, zfs I'm beginning to become too fragmented to stay focused on |
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the task(s) at hand. |
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(Side rant) |
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If you read some of my (broken english) postings, they are mostly due to |
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hardware irritants that have the majoring of my limited brain cells |
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agitated to the point of illiteracy...... I use gmane (to post to |
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gentoo-user) and it use to have spell checking, or I hacked it, but, for |
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what ever reason, spellcheck in gmane seems to be gone now........ |
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Anyway, I'd like to hear all of the ideas, including various disciplined |
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(structured) approaches I can take to minimize uniqueness in my lab and what |
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I'm currently doing (mostly). I also have usb sticks, but I've |
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found booting various offernings on usb, particularly older hardware, to |
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be too biosed_burdened. |
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Bear in mind, I also have dozens of embedded boards, some x86, but |
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mostly arm based, that are also in the mix. As soon as some less expensive |
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arm64 (aarch64) boards become available, those too will become much more |
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prevalent in my lab. I need some new organizational (software and Image) |
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ideas. My hardware is very well organied on large, open racks with |
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lots of UPS power and easy physical access to each box/board. |
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I'm also going to draw things up using (app-admin/rackview). |
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If/when I can take my network security to the next level, |
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I'd like to open up 1/2 of the machines to the gentoo community |
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for testing and debug on actual hardware. A portal to actuall hardware |
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resources. I basically need the ability to move around complete |
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system images between differment boxes. |
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thoughts and comments are most welcome! |
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James |