[gentoo-server] Wrapping my brain around a gold server.

[Dormando]

Hey,

I've been lurking for a bit, and I guess it's time to open my mouth and
firmly implant foot:

I have a base understanding of everything in the infrastructures.org
document, although I need some more free time to digest and re-read the
whole thing. I've also been keeping up with all of the discussions so far,
and perusing the wiki when I have time.

Is this easily applicable to reserving machines, and giving those
hardawre classes? A lot of this talk is about kickstarting machines into
a class, preparing updates for a class, etc.

But what I'm looking at (at least in my own work), are possibly two sets
of classes, but one overlaps the other.

What I aim to be able to do easily, is have a "cluster" or available
machines with various hardware configurations running (or possibly even
extended to wait for wakeup-on-lan, but that's above this scope). So when
we do our quarterly hardware ordering, as soon as we get the machines we
kickstart them into a bare, bare install and shove them in a rack. Then,
as we need them, we can define a class and have the configration system
pull an appropriate machine out of the pool, and tell it to class itself
for the correct packages.

But there are possibly two classes; in this example, I have hardware
configured with dual P4 xeons (for heavy hitting DB servers, mail servers,
etc), and slower non-scsi machines for dynamic webservers. When I
kickstart each of these, I would add them to a hardware class pool (These
are P4 xeons, these are dual athlon mp's...)

>From there, when I say "I want another MySQL DB server", the gold server
would give it a class for those packages, compiled under its hardware
class. I could also should probably say "I want a dual P4 xeon MySQL DB
server"
Then the next time the selected machine does a pull, it would magically
become a database server, awaiting further CVS configuration. It wouldn't
need to compile *all* of the P4 packages for a DB server, or a mail
server, it would need to keep a compile for all required packages matched
by all software classes for each hardware class. Yeah?

Does this make sense, and am I on the right or left track? :)

Currently I help manage a melange (over 300) of servers ranging from
sunos, to redhat 6.2, to redhat 7.2+. I hope that mayhaps in a year or so
the gentoo server project will be mature enough to start rolling out
servers under infrastructure planning, and slowly rebuild old servers
into the new setup. I'm relatively new here, and there's a hell of a lot
of legacy in this network.

have fun,
-Dormando