Charles Duffy wrote:
I'm looking at replacing SuSE SLES9 with Gentoo for an enterprise
application (for reasons of flexibility and licensing) (no, we don't
have an enterprise application budget -- just the reliability
requirements; yaaay, startups!). We're looking to be able to deploy and
manage hundreds of geographically distributed servers.
We're using gentoo and managed to scale from 1 server to 600servers.
Some particular questions which come to mind:
- Should I be using a custom profile or a standard profile with
overrides through make.conf, /etc/portage/* and the like?
We currently use a standard profile and override if necessary.
- What's the Right Way to create new system images ready to be loaded
onto a hard drive or run through a virtual machine? gentoo-buildhoster
looks interesting. I've seen Catalyst mentioned as a way to create
stage3 images, but what documentation I've been able to find doesn't
seem very much targeted for my use cases.
We''re using a combination of catalyst, pxe and the cli-installer from
agaffney which we extended to support our configuration database.
catalyst stage4 works fine for us and enables us to repeat build our
system images. Additionally we use the packages generated by catalyst as
input for our
binary package server. We're currently looking into the tinderbox target
to use catalyst to validate new packages on existing system images.
After installing we use a grub config file which allows us to reinstall
over pxe very easily.
- Any experiences with puppet? With out ratio of servers to staff,
automating configuration and administration is a priority. (We already
have an internal tool written with automating the server configuration
process in mind; it has some functionality puppet doesn't, and puppet
has functionality it doesn't; in theory, I'd like to extend puppet until
our internal tool becomes unnecessary, though I'll need to understand
puppet much better before I can think too hard about that).
Puppet works fine for us, we used to run our own scripts for
configuration stuff but that grew too complex and hard to extend.
We're currently converting to puppet and actually just finished
converting our web farm to puppet-controlled hosts.
Stability is sometimes an issue and we are actively looking for
scalability issues with our current setup but overall we're extremely
happy with the tool.
Ramon
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