Re: [gentoo-user] how do you keep up with system administration?

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On 5/29/07, Denis <denis.che@×××××.com> wrote:
> I'm curious to know your approach to keeping your Gentoo box current
> without it becoming a full-time job.  I'm not talking about
> maintaining servers - just your "daily driver", so to say.
>
> How often do you sync with the current portage tree and compare it
> your versions in "world"?  Should one do this once a week?  Once in
> two weeks?
>
> How often to you update major components, like Xorg, kernel, and
> system tool chain?  As soon as new things become available, or, say,
> once a month or so?
>
> The reason I ask is because I often don't have a lot of time to devote
> to system administration on a regular basis but do want to keep my box
> updated as much as possible.  How do some of you non-developers
> balance system administration with your "day job"?
> --
> gentoo-user@g.o mailing list
>
>

I have a cron job that does emerge --sync and another that does
revdep-rebuild -p.  These email me their results.

At least once a week, I manually do
  emerge -aDvu world
Unless there's something particularly weird, I say "yes" when
it asks if I want the emerge.

I have the PORTAGE_NICENESS set to 15 in /etc/make.conf,
and since there are 4 hyperthreads on this machine, I also have
MAKEOPTS=-j4.  Together, these leave enough compute power
that I never really notice the load.  Besides, it's easy to start the
emerge at the end of the day.

At the end of the emerge, I run etc-update.  Each change I make
in a config file is tagged with a string that is easy to recognize.
If I have never modified a config file in the past, I accept all
changes -- I reason that if what the devs did the first time was
good enough, that is probably still true.  There are only about
a dozen packages that I made any changes to, so it's fairly easy
to keep up with things.

Most weeks I spend less than an hour on administration.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list