[gentoo-server] GSP installation server + portage network

[Frido Ferdinand]

Hi There,

I've been lurking on this list for quite some time. However I've been
following the Gentoo Server project and I have to say it's getting more
and more interesting. Just a quick introduction. I work at a small /
medium webhosting and colocation company in tHe Netherlands,
administrating about 50 machine, most of them Cobalt (uhrg) and Redhat.
I've been using Gentoo since 1.0pre2 and I've been very satisfied, it
has slowly spread through my homenetwork and servers and now that I'm
building a new platform to replace the cobalts it's time to deploy it on
a bigger scale at work. There are a few things that really need to be
resolved before i can do this _properly_. It's crossed the list a few
times:

1. Easy deployment (as in redhat kickstart)
2. Easy package management (security updates)

I intentionally left configuration management out of this because my
ideas on the above topics are more refined. To start with the second 
point, my basic theory is that: Package Management should be left to
Portage. This sounds logical on 1 computer, but what if you have a
network ? Should portage be made network aware ? I think so. Package
management on a network should be as easy as:

emerge --target="host.domain.tld" emerge apache

Anything other is just workaround on the fact that emerge is not network
aware. However this does lead to one thing, this setup will not let you
interoperate with other systems. This is not a requirement for me as I
have existing tools to do just that. I suspect that others will probably
think differently on this matter and I would really be interested to
hear their view of the requirements of this project. 

As these are changes in the portage codebase it's mainly left to the
portage developers/managers to include this functionality is they think
it's the way to go. As a sidenote, if portage does gets network aware
there won't be any need for gcc or even portage on your clients, also
you get remote tripwire support as the md5sums are on the master host.

The deployment part is more interesting as it's easier to start working
on, basically this project should bring a host to a known working system
based on an configuration file (more about this later).  My ideal
installation would work like this:

1 Machine boots from PXE enabled network card
2 It gets its ip from dhcp
3 Pxeloader is started with a kernel and a gentoo bootfloppy implementation
4 The "boofloppy" loads a cloop image from the server
5 The cloop contains the standard livecd tools + python
6 A script like glis, reads the master configfile (think kickstartfile)
from a server and installs the host.
7 Server is rebooted, the machine can now be administed by portage (remotely!)

As I'd like to take the above as a starting point for a discussion I
posted[1] the details about the configuration file on the projects wiki
(hint, the network is mapped as a tree in an xml file, much like the
documents on infrastructure.org). As you will see both projects are
tightly integrated, and hopefully if people think this is the way to go
than we can get started on getting our hands dirty with some code, at
least I know I will :-)

Be sure to check the wiki so you can see some more implementation
details, especially the configuration file. I'm very much looking
forward to your comments.

Regards,

	-- Frido Ferdinand (Pyretic on OPN)


[1] http://www.subverted.net/wakka/wakka.php?wakka=GoldServerTheory
(message and GSPImplementation)