Is there a tool for updating Gentoo machines w/o compiling?

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Mardok45 · Post by **Mardok45** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 8:53 pm

I don't actually need this, just been wondering if there's a tool that does this...

Let's say you wanted to put Gentoo on every workstation in the building, but you don't want to make every machine spend an hour or so compiling just to be up-to-date.

Instead of telling all the machines to do an emerge --sync; emerge -uDN world every day/week, you instead put Gentoo onto a dedicated VM. Have that VM do all the compiling, and then you do some kind of rsync operation on the Gentoo file system, and have all the machines sync up with the VM by grabbing the rsync tarball that the VM created.

I hope that made sense.

Does anyone know if there's a tool that does this, or do you have to write the script yourself?

Again, I really don't need this, I was just wondering.

Jimini · Post by **Jimini** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 9:44 pm

Of course you can share your portage tree and the distfiles and mount it via NFS, for example. I have never built software on a pc and distributed it to another on, but it is possible. But, of course, you have to take care of different architectures, hardware (=> different useflags) and so on. Some months ago I read an article about a public pc-pool running on Gentoo. Depending on your network, a solution using PXE could be very useful.

Best regards,
Jimini

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 10:37 pm

afaik Sabayon's equo provides that kind of functionality but that wouldn't be 100% Gentoo anymore

jongeek · Post by **jongeek** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 10:51 pm

net-proxy/http-replicator can share both binary and source files from one machine to others. I use it at work so I don't have to download/build packages on multiple systems. You may need to set up more than one if your architectures or CFLAGS differ from one system to another. Or use multiple build VMs.

Ion Silverbolt · Post by **Ion Silverbolt** » Sun Jun 13, 2010 10:56 pm

You can have one machine do the compiling and have a binhost setup so the other machines install the pre-compiled binaries from the binhost. This is especially effective if all the workstations use the same cpu arch. If not, you might have to set up more than one, or use more generic arch flags to support a wider variety of architectures.

It's not too hard to setup at all either. I compile binhost files all the time for my netbook because it's a turd for compiling.

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 6:10 pm

Mardok45,

You can set up both a binhost, so that one system serves binary packages to all the others and a compile farm with distcc so that the others contribute to building the binary packages.

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 6:17 pm

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Installing Gentoo.

cach0rr0 · Post by **cach0rr0** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 7:00 pm

NeddySeagoon wrote:Mardok45,

You can set up both a binhost, so that one system serves binary packages to all the others and a compile farm with distcc so that the others contribute to building the binary packages.

++

this is what I do at work

rackspace has gentoo 10.1 Xen guests that come without portage, and without a number of other things I need for work.

I've not looked at the binhost process, but distcc for damn sure makes things loads easier

(we're up to 24 gentoo servers now, btw, and this has easily tripled our scalability!)

pilla · Post by **pilla** » Thu Jun 17, 2010 10:52 am

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Portage & Programming.