Maintaining/Upgrading Gentoo on *many* computers...

[gregcoit]

Hi all,

This question is not specific to gentoo, but it seems as good a place as any to ask.

I'm using Gentoo on the server and client workstation for my computer game/internet cafe (eventually up to 20 or so computers). All workstations have identical hardware (ASUS NForce board, AMD 1333, 512 DDR Ram, 40Gb Drive, *NO* cdrom or floppy).

What I'm looking for is an easy way to mantain/upgrade all the computers in the least painful way possible. Wiping the disks *is* an option because they nfs the home directory from the server. Up to now I've been wiping the disk and reinstalling when I want to do a major upgrade (emerge world is scary) but this is a 24 hour process...

I've tried various ways of taring and untaring the filesystems, but have a hard time getting *all* the files (some complaints about /dev files).

So, anyway to upgrade/install on one system and then "propigate" this to a bunch of other computers (remember, exact same hardware)?

Thanks!

[Beforegod]

Why you dont use dd??

Make an Image of one working machine, ssave it on the server and recover it over nfs on the client computer..

So you have the posibility to recover an non-working client within minutes..

Before you make the images, you define a cron job to emerge rsync && emerge --update world every night or every two days..

This should be useful!

Cheers,
BeforeGod

[Flake]

various degrees of thin clients come to my mind.