Re: Re: master server and other ideas

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I am running a small setup (currently 9 servers) with a master server. 
All of the servers are older P2-400 or P3-550's.  The master server is a 
dual P2-400 and it shares via NFS /usr/portage and /usr/portage.local. 
Whenever I build packages I use the -b flag so a .tbz2 package is 
created.  The slave servers then mount those NFS shares read-only to 
prevent them from messing up the default packages.

I still need to develop some tools to improve the automation of the 
system -- currently I just have a cron job on each slave that emails me 
whenever there are different packages installed on the master.  So there 
is currently too much overhead to scale to hundreds of systems -- though 
I won't have to scale to that many computers.

The biggest issue I have come across is when ebuilds are not package 
safe.  The current whopper is baselayout.  The full process must be run 
on each server, because after merging the package it then copies more 
files from the build dir.  Several have complained about the package to 
the Gentoo Developers (including bug report #23762) but they don't seem 
interested in our concerns (the bug report is listed as 
"Resolved|Wontfix").  It would be nice if ebuilds that are not package 
save would not make a package (a baselayout package can be created -- 
but it will throw several errors during a emerge -k) or at least if 
portage failed on an attempt to install rather than installing with 
dozens of errors.

The Infrastructure Bootstrapping whitepaper looks great -- I'll be 
reviewing it in detail tonight.  I had not thought of using CVS, but 
should be exactly what I need for managing /etc files on the slaves.

A process to create a bootable floppy/CD to do automated installs would 
be fabulous -- and would help me evangelize to other parts of the 
University of Washington.

All the boot floppy/CD needs to do is:
1) boot
2) mount NFS (AFS/Samba) shares
3) run a config/install script on the mounted share

Hmm... so it seems to me that the boot floppy/CD does not need to be 
Gentoo specific.

The Config/Install script would then do the disk partitioning, software 
installation (emerge -uk or a stage3/4), and configuration.

jbw

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