> I'm thinking of something along the lines of a simple tarball of a few > essentials (i.e. stage3 + kernel + network settings) and then simply > getting the remainder pre-compiled binary packages off an ftp server > somewhere in our network as we want to keep this down to 1 cd. > However, I've never had to do anything like this before - so I'm at a > bit of a loss.
Sounds good. You install Gentoo on some machine, tar the whole filesystem (without including mounted /proc, /sys, /dev ones), then you untar on the target machine, install bootloader, and that's all. I see no problem. You think good. You just do it. :-) Of course, if machines hardware differ, you should consider kernel issues, maybe CFLAGS differences... However, these are details. > In short, are there any better ways of doing this (instead oftarballing > the the whole thing and throwing it onto a livecd)? Maybe, but the first is OK. > Where can I 'trim the fat'? (i.e., /usr/portage and the ilk) Network filesystem mounted with readonly permission? > Also, are there any tools for mass remote administration? SSH is nice > and all, but it would be awesome if one could tell 30 machines to > shutdown -h now simultaneously. See x11-terms/pssh in portage (http://www.theether.org/pssh/). or: for host in $(cat ./ips); do ssh $host command; done > I'm perfectly content with editing a knoppix iso (gentoo live cd's have > a tendency towards not booting on our Dell Optiplex GX1's ( > http://support.jp.dell.com/docs/systems/ban_gx1/specs.htm ), which are > the bulk of our lab), deleting all of the unecessary stuff and adding > the tarball in some random folder - but it feels so... unelegant. If it works... Many years ago I read about a nice solution of a 'computer related problem'. Company A had to transmit some data to the other part of a city. While there were a lot of possibilities, the best solution turned out to use.. pigeons! Was that 'elegant' solution? ;-) That book was 'Programming pearls' if I recall (and translate) correctly. Wonderful reading...
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