At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a production environment.
It is more stable than most commercial distributions (Red Hat and Mandrake in particular).
We use it in a corporate environment, and are doing so very successfully.
HOWEVER, it is a rapidly moving target, and as such you have to manage your own "releases". I do this by maintaining a local rsync (portage) and http (distfiles) mirror, and pointing all our local machines to a particular release on that mirror, e.g. in /etc/make.conf:
SYNC="rsync://192.168.1.40/2003-spring" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://192.168.1.40/gentoo http://oregonstate.edu...etc";
I do not do nightly upgrades into 2003-spring, I keep that frozen (and merge in security fixes by adding those ebuilds, digest files, and meta-data caches by hand). New targets are in a different, "testing" directory. When upgrade time comes (1 per quarter, 1 per month, whatever), I modify the SYNC entry in make.conf on the clients to point to the new internal release (e.g. "2003-summer"), and run an emerge --deep -up world by hand. This only after thorough testing of the new target, and always in a chrooted environment on a second set of partitions so that, if despite the testing things go bad, I can boot up the old installation and revert in no more time than a reboot requires.
I never, ever run major emerge --deep -up worlds on the only existing production partitions, but always against a second set of identical partitions. Always leave a way out.
Doing this results in a more stable and better performing production environment than with any other distribution I've used, including all of the major ones (Debian, Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc.).
This approach works very well, and Gentoo has proven itself to be vastly better than average in a very demanding corporate production environment.
Jean.
Thanks for the detailed description of what you are doing Jean...
Consider this my vote for adding a standard Gentoo 'How-To' - for those of us who are still Linux Masters in training - detailing how to do something like this in a step by step manner. I believe this is vitally important to Gentoo being accepted in more conservative corporate environments.
Thanks
Charles
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