Folks, I'm curious how other sysadmins rapidly deploy a slew of new Gentoo systems? In this case I'm setting up many dozens of Gentoo servers inside of VMware ESX and having to destroy and redeploy said systems regularly.
The "hardware" (virtual, of course) varies ever so slightly, so cloning (via ESX or dd) is not an option. I'm looking for a rapid installation method similar to that of the Ubuntu server (just a few steps in an ncurses-driven menu and everything is up in short order). Or better yet, an automated Anaconda installation such as the one available for Red Hat. Gentoo is an absolute joy to use, so moving to another distribution isn't an option. ;) I'm simply looking for a much simpler method in automatically deploying / installing systems. Some things I've looked at before: - writing my own installation script (worked "okay" but I had to update it and make changes to keep up with portage regularly) - sought other automated / scripted installation methods - GLIS is ancient and I'm not sure it's being maintained (or if it even works) - it seems others have tried and failed in creating a popular installation method I've thought about creating my own stage4 (manually) but it makes more sense to somehow automate an installation method so that the "nightly" stage3 builds that Gentoo distributes will be used. Otherwise my stage4 will become "out of date" somewhat regularly. Metro (drobbin's catalyst replacement) has piqued my interest and seems *almost* right for the job. But Metro doesn't seem as though my standard slew of configuration files (fstab, make.conf, etc.) can be automatically placed inside of the stage{3,4} tarball during the scripted generation of the stage3. Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions? -j