Cloning and maintaining Workstations via rsync?

[mnagl]

Hello!

I am planning to install Gentoo on some similar machines in a network. A great advantage using Linux and espacially Gentoo in this situation is of course that cloning one good installation with a well-planned reasonable configuration is no more than cp -a.

Now my question: As the software equipment on the machines should stay permanently the same while user configuration and /etc-configuration might differ a lot (except /etc/profile, /etc/portage/*, /etc/make.conf) - would it be possible to update all the machines by simply rsyncing all directories except /home and /etc (and /tmp of course) from one machine where the emerge -u runs are executed or are there any drawbacks or potential problems with this method?

Does probably anyone has experience with maintaining a number of user-workstations under gentoo? Are there any best-practice-rules? Any ideas? I think this is an important step on the way to Linux(/Gentoo) on the Desktop - especially considering companies.

Matthias

[fangorn]

As you will have to update /etc files too, the rsync will not suffice. And I dont know what happens if the file you want to overwrite is currently in use.

My solution was, build updates on one machine with emerge -b and install on the other machines with emerge -k. For the changes in /etc/ you have to do an etc-update on one machine. exclude hand edited and machine dependent files. Make an archive of the changed files and distribute them to the other machines. Delete the non needed update files on the other machines. The hand edited and machine dependent files have to be treated seperately, most can be handled by some small sed scripts or similar.

For 2 or 3 machines this may be overkill, but try running to 200 or more machines and you will gladly hack for an hour next time.
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