Kuroo - remote management of Portage trees/packages (IDEA)

[Januszzz]

Hi,

I'm active systems administrator and guess what - I'm using only Gentoo on my machines

As maintaining more then twenty++ different Gentoo machines can be complex and sometimes hard I was wondering if I could use Kuroo for that, just like use it on my workstation.

But Kuroo needs X, a display manager, QT, and many other dependencies. I'm not going to install it on every little virtual server I use.

But what I'm using on all of my servers is ssh. So I was wondering if I could use Kuroo to maintain packages on remote link....

First idea was to do a chroot with X and Kuroo (so i do not b0rk my filesystem ) then mount remote filesystem through sshfs, replace all paths, adjust Portage configs and emerge into the directory... Maybe it could be done in that way, but it would be really much more complex than using Portage in usual way.

The idea: Isn't it better to implement Kuroo as a "console" to a server using Portage commands over ssh? Sth like Vmware Server Console, but limited to
Portage management.

Or in the future such feature could be included as a module in sth like "Landscape for Gentoo".

(landscape for Ubuntu: http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5288220442.html - I assume they're using ssh, this is what I would do).

How do you think guys?

Januszzz.

[Errtu]

[Clete2]

What's wrong with just using Portage to manage your systems? Why do you need the extra front-end?
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[Januszzz]

[wyv3rn]

This is what Gentoo _really_ lacks. From a management POV, Gentoo doesn't not scale well in the enterprise. A centralized Gentoo/portage management console is needed.

[Clete2]

Oh, I see what you want. I must have misread your post. It would be nice to have a centralized management system. This would definitely create more appeal to businesses.
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[think4urs11]

Canonicals landscape could be something to take a look at (maybe, just maybe) it has some flexible backend which can be adopted to Gentoos needs.
The feature list seems to be the perfect wet dream for any admin with a bigger number of Gentoo systems
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[AllenJB]

I'm sure there was work done before on mass deployment for Gentoo previously. I seem to remember a talk at Gentoo UK either last year or the year before. Can't remember who did it or what became of it. welp, edit_21, Uberlord or NeddySeagoon might be able to remember better.

[nixnut]

[Januszzz]

[wyv3rn]

[adsmith]

I run gentoo on a half-dozen machines, and keeping config files and packages synchronized is really a pain.

My current, half-assed, solution is to

1) keep all relevant config files (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/*, and various custom scripts and daemon settings) in a Mercurial repository, so its easy to make sure all machines have the same options set

2) make extensive use of "emerge -k" after building on a central machine (using distcc, of course)

3) pre-package kernels, so *nothing* has to be re-built on each machine (search for my recent posts to see the method and ebuild I use for this)

4) I either NFS a single portage tree, or I use a squashed image of it on all machines, depending on their connectivity


I wish there were a smoother way, especially since portage is so dog-slow with binary tbz2's. Maybe it would be slightly better if I *also* used one of those "run-this-command-on-all-machines" ssh tools.


Also, to simplify everything in this way, I am forced to take the union of all config options of all machines, which almost means I'm making my own i686 binary distribution... uggh. This almost makes me wish Archlinux wasn't so flakey and Ubuntu wasn't so inflexible so I could let someone else do all the work.

[nixnut]

[Januszzz]