Re: announcing the Gentoo Server Project

On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 23:19, Vano D wrote:
> - Server profile: The idea is that all software installed is *stable* 

People have varying impressions of what "stable" means, which is part of
the whole problem. I also see that as the solution. Stable means
whatever you want it to mean - it is what YOU are happy with, right
then, at that point in time. The trick is how to achieve and control
this?

In anything larger than a one man one box show, a team is going to want
[need!] to try something out before they unleash it on their production
systems. Often, this means running an application on a testing / staging
/ beta-test server first, then saying, "yup, it's good to go".

The other side of this coin is needing to *control* what gets rolled
out. When trouble can happen is that even if you've tested on one box,
if the emerge rsync is newer on the production box, it might just go and
bring in something horribly unstable. 

The obvious solution there is to have some way of controlling what
packages [ebuilds?] the production boxes see. This can be having a
central distribution server, which you upgrade and build on, until you
reach a point you're happy with, then allow the target machines to pull
those packages in over the internal network and build/install.

I'm going to forward two messages to this list that came over
gentoo-user a few months back. Apologies for those who all ready read
them. They are:

[1] Jean Smith <[email protected]> "Re: survey: gentoo corporate usage?"
[2] Andrea Barisani <[email protected]> "How to admin a
multiple Gentoo Installation (and keep your sanity)"

I'm not convinced that either of these solutions are the way to go, but
both are impressive evidence of people working around the problems that
Gentoo presents so they can take advantage of the power of the
distribution in a production setting.

Imagine what they'll be able to do with a little support from Gentoo
itself?

Food for thought.
All the best,

AfC

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

Australia +61 2 9977 6866  North America +1 646 270 5376

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/

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