gentoo & multiple servers

cerulean · n00b Joined: 17 Aug 2002 Posts: 4

Hi everyone.. I am a Red Hat distro guy -- I heard about Gentoo about a month ago, did a VMWare install and like the portage system. I am thinking about deploying it beyond VMWare and on some production servers, however, I have a few questions.

1. Is Gentoo considered production ready?
2. Is it possible to have the system notify of package updates? (maybe something like 'mail admin < emerge world list')
3. Is it possible to have one machine compile the source (standard emerge) and then have duplicate machines grab the compiled data and install (ie multiple web servers, email servers, etc-- same configuration, etc..)
4. Any reason why gentoo should NOT be used in a server environment?
5. If I wanted to bring additional servers online to provide more capacity (www or email), what would be the 'best practice' for doing so? I was thinking something along the lines of ghosting a base system image, then running an update/sync against another server? would this work?

delta407 · Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2002 3:29 pm Post subject:

1. I consider it to be. It is very stable and very fast, but don't go around randomly swapping in new packages unless you test them first.

2. Just set up a cron job to mail the results of `emerge -up world | grep [` (the grep only shows the list of packages to update and not the header/footer)

3. Yes. "emerge -b", distribute tarball to all your boxen, emerge tarball, and that's it. But be sure that your source box has the same make.conf as the rest of the systems.

4. Not that I can think of. Other than you don't get 24/7 support by voice, etc. But the forums are here (which really are a good reference) and Gentoo tries to teach you to be self-sufficient, so...

5. It should work; I don't know why it wouldn't. Heck, you could install the source system in VMware, tar+bzip2 the root filesystem, shuffle it around your network, etc.
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