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[Apologies if this is a duplicate post; I tried posting this through |
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GMANE yesterday without subscribing first, and it appears not to have |
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gone through; likewise when I posted several hours ago today from a |
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different address than the one I subscribed]. |
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|
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All, |
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|
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I'm looking at replacing SuSE SLES9 with Gentoo for an enterprise |
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application (for reasons of flexibility and licensing) (no, we don't |
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have an enterprise application budget -- just the reliability |
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requirements; yaaay, startups!). We're looking to be able to deploy and |
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manage hundreds of geographically distributed servers. |
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We have a QA department available to vet each configuration before it is |
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deployed to the field. We have infrastructure for tracking the progress |
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of code in svn from creation though QA to deployment; I'm anticipating |
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tracking a local overlay (containing all packages we use), make.conf, |
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/etc/portage/*, etc. through this system, autobuilding system images |
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(either to run virtualized or on real hardware) from the contents of |
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svn, building binary packages and deploying them to real hardware. |
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I'm interested in best practices, suggested tools, and/or 3rd party |
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experiences in this regard. |
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|
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Some particular questions which come to mind: |
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- Should I be using a custom profile or a standard profile with |
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overrides through make.conf, /etc/portage/* and the like? |
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- What's the Right Way to create new system images ready to be loaded |
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onto a hard drive or run through a virtual machine? gentoo-buildhoster |
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looks interesting. I've seen Catalyst mentioned as a way to create |
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stage3 images, but what documentation I've been able to find doesn't |
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seem very much targeted for my use cases. |
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- Any experiences with puppet? With out ratio of servers to staff, |
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automating configuration and administration is a priority. (We already |
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have an internal tool written with automating the server configuration |
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process in mind; it has some functionality puppet doesn't, and puppet |
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has functionality it doesn't; in theory, I'd like to extend puppet until |
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our internal tool becomes unnecessary, though I'll need to understand |
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puppet much better before I can think too hard about that). |
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- Have any of 'yall been in the 100s-of-servers situation with |
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comparable requirements and come up with a different approach to |
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managing it? How did things work out? |
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Thank you! |
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-- |
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gentoo-server@g.o mailing list |