[gentoo-server] Re: Advice on Gentoo Servers

[MIkey]

Technomancer wrote:

> I choosed Gentoo because using other distros I could not build the
> system the way I wanted without headache.
>
> On most cases there was the necessity of package compilation, ignoring
> the package management systems of most distros. This sounds like chaos
> to me.
>
> Using Portage I coul add and remove features of programs like Postfix
> without making some ugly workaround.

I migrated to Gentoo for the exact same reasons, I needed to be able to
customize deployments.  In my opinion this (portage) is the most
significant strength of Gentoo.

It is not, however, without its challenges.  In my experience it is pure
insanity to attempt to maintain upgrades directly on servers.  You will
definitely want to maintain a deployment test environment to work through
any problems after syncing your portage tree before attempting to apply
upgrades to production servers.  I wrote a utility to do this -
http://badpenguins.com/source/gentoo-buildhoster/ if you are interested in
trying it out.

As far as managing config files and such, I have rarely had problems
managing them via dispatch-conf.  There are situations that will bite you
in the ass if you are not careful though, debacles such as forced upgrades
to a new apache config file layout, radically different installations of
php between upgrades, disappearing kernel source ebuilds, and so on.  Hence
my suggestion to do any upgrades in a test environment before pushing them
out to the servers ;)

-- 
gentoo-server@g.o mailing list