On Sat, Jul 02, 2011 at 03:14:38PM -0700, Grant wrote: > > After a frustrating experience with a Linksys WRT54GL, I've decided to > stick with Gentoo routers. This increases the number of Gentoo > systems I'm responsible for and they're nearing double-digits. What > can be done to make the management of multiple Gentoo systems easier? > I think identical hardware in each system would help a lot but I'm not > sure that's practical. I need to put together a bunch of new > workstations and I'm thinking some sort of server/client arrangement > with the only Gentoo install being on the server could be appropriate.
I maintain multiple Gentoo we mostly use as KVM hosts systems (and coming embedded routers). As KVM hosts, some of them are very sensible. Due to the contracts to our customers, I have to do with various update strategies on top of various hardware. I've set up a private Gentoo mirror in order to follow updates nicely (all customers want to update slowly). Well, it's not a true mirror. To be able to upgrade old systems, I do "private" releases of Gentoo approximately once a month. A full mirror of all releases would be too much data. So, I only fetch portage tree and packages from a list I maintain manually (emerge sucks at that game, by the way). Data is stored on a nilfs filesystem to improve snapshots size on disk. -- Nicolas Sebrecht
