[gentoo-dev] GeNUS : how I currently manage my gentoo network (200+ machines)

[Hubert Mercier]

Hi,

When I recently "officially" joined the Gentoo Project, I had the idea 
to share a part of my work, in the way of a scripts set I've been 
working on for more than 2 years now, which I called GeNUS (Gentoo 
Network Update System).

My lab and teaching department massively used Linux for 4 years now, 
and, since september 2004, I only use Gentoo on students computers. This 
means, more than 200 computers, located on different and distant sites, 
using VLANs. To deal with these machines, I had to create a set of 
scripts to help me install / remove / update / reconfigure machines, 
without leaving my cumfortable chair ;). I'll try to explain how it 
currently works...

I use a webserver to "push" software updates. On this server we can find 
a "machine map" : in fact a simple text file, containing one line per 
machine. Each machine (=client) is identified by its MAC address (easily 
extracted from the DHCP configuration). Each of these addresses is 
followed by one or more keywords, representing the "scripts sets" to 
apply on the client config (I currently use one scripts set per hardware 
architecture, to apply hardware configs, and another one per "software 
profile"). For each of these keyworks, the client downloads another 
file, called "update list" (.ul files). Each "update list" file contains 
the url of a few update scripts, which are to be ran on the client, to 
effectively install / remove software, etc... Of course, the client 
keeps a record of each update, in order not to re-run the same procedures.

To prepare the packages deployment, I use portage' hability to download 
and use binary packages : all my packages are pre-compiled on a staging 
machine, and then binary packages are created. This way, I save a lot of 
power (good for my planet), and a lot of time too (good for my users, 
and, consequently, for me :P).

GeNUS is launched at boot-time, using the "local" Gentoo service, and 
has an integrated auto-update procedure. It is actually written in bash, 
sometimes with a clean code, sometimes with a "less clean" code, and it 
would probably need to be re-written more efficiently. I would be glad 
to help to course.

Since this work saved me a lot of work / time / money in the past two 
years, I thought maybe it could help others. Just let me know if we 
could do something with this, if it sounds usefull/less to you, etc...

Cheers,

Hubert

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