Re: [gentoo-user] Managing multiple systems with identical hardware

[Grant]

>> I'm trying to reduce the number of systems I spend time managing.  My
>> previous plan was to set up multiseat on a small number of systems.
>> Now I'm wondering if it would be better to use multiple systems with
>> identical hardware and manage them in some sort of an optimized way so
>> that each set of identical hardware behaves as much like a single
>> machine as possible for management.  I could use small SoC systems so
>> I don't have to worry about sourcing components later.  Is there a
>> good tool or framework for this sort of thing?
>
> The solution you pick depends heavily on how many of these identical
> machines you have.
>
> For some small-ish number (gut feel tells me up to around 10 or so), you
> could do what I do for my development vms[2]:

Yes, under 10.

> - have 1 decent spec'ed machine as the master and buildhost
> - share /etc/portage/, $PORTDIR, /var/packages and /var/distfiles to all
> clients from some central location (NFS works really well for this)
> - for each package you want to have on a client, emerge it on the
> buildhost with the -b option (create binary packages)
> - emerge stuff on the clients with the -k (or possibly -K) option to use
> binary packages. Everything should show up in purple. If anything is a
> different colour, emerge that package on the buildhost and remerge it on
> the client.
> - for awesome street cred geek-points, install clusterssh and do all
> your clients in parallel[1]
>
> As long as you share important directories to each client, things stay
> consistent. What you essentially achieve is "build once-install many times"
>
> However, and I'm likely to get shot down for this here, I think you
> *really* need to reconsider whether Gentoo is even what you should be
> using for this. Put aside emotional attachments to your fav distro and
> take a long hard critical look at your pain-gain ratio. If all you
> really need is standard user-type gui stuffs on each client, what is
> Gentoo really buying you (other than the thrill of watching gcc output
> scroll by over and over and over....)
>
> Use gentoo by all means on your central server to get exactly the
> features you want (Gentoo's strong point), but ona bunch of regular
> clients... I dunno, Ubuntu or Fedora are hard to beat for that...

I'm thinking of a different approach and I'm getting pretty excited.

I realized I only need two types of systems in my life.  One hosted
server and bunch of identical laptops.  My laptop, my wife's laptop,
our HTPC, routers, and office workstations could all be on identical
hardware, and what better choice than a laptop?  Extremely
space-efficient, portable, built-in UPS (battery), and no need to buy
a separate monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, camera, etc.  Some
systems will use all of that stuff and some will use none, but it's
OK, laptops are getting cheap, and keyboard/mouse/video comes in handy
once in a while on any system.

What if my laptop is the master system and I install any application
that any of the other laptops need on my laptop and push its entire
install to all of the other laptops via rsync whenever it changes?
The only things that would vary by laptop would be users and
configuration.  Maybe puppet could help with that?  It would almost be
like my own distro.  Some laptops would have stuff installed that they
don't need but at least they aren't running Fedora! :)

If I can make this work I will basically only admin my laptop and
hosted server no matter how large the office grows.  Huge time savings
and huge scalability.  No multiseat required.  Please shoot this down!

- Grant