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>>>>> I see what you desire now - essentially you want to clone your laptop |
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>>>>> (or big chunks of it) over to your other workstations. |
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I've been working on this and I think I have a good and simple plan. |
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My laptop roams around with me and is the "master" system. The office |
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router is the "submaster" system. All of the other office systems are |
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"minion" systems. All of the systems are 100% hardware-identical |
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laptops. All of the minions are 100% software-identical. |
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I install every package that any system needs on the master and create |
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an SSH keypair. The only config files that change from their state on |
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the master are: /etc/conf.d/hostname, /etc/conf.d/net, |
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/etc/ssh/sshd_config, /etc/shorewall/*. I write comments in those |
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files which serve as flags for scripted changes. |
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I write a script that is run from the master to the submaster, or from |
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the submaster to a minion. If it's the former, rsync / is run with |
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exceptions (/usr/portage, /usr/local/portage, /var/log, /tmp, /home, |
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/root but /root/.ssh/id_rsa_script* is included), my personal user is |
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removed, a series of workstation users are created with useradd -m, |
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services are added or removed from /etc/runlevels/default, and config |
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files are changed according to comment flags. If it's the latter, |
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rsync / is run without exceptions, services are added or removed from |
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/etc/runlevels/default, and config files are changed according to |
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comment flags. |
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All user info on the submaster and minions would be effectively reset |
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whenever the script is run and that's fine. Root logins would have to |
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be allowed on the submaster and minions but only with the SSH key. |
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There are probably more paths to exclude when rsyncing master to |
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submaster. |
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That's it. No matter how numerous the minions become, this should |
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allow me to keep everything running by administrating only my own |
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system, pushing that to the submaster, and having the submaster push |
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to the minions. I've been going over the nitty-gritty and everything |
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looks good. |
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What do you think? Is there anything inherently wrong with rsyncing / |
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onto a running system? If there are little or no changes to make, |
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about how much data would actually be transferred? Is there a better |
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tool for this than rsync? I know Funtoo uses git for syncing with |
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their portage tree. |
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- Grant |
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