How many Gentoo boxes do you maintain?

eccerr0r

This was starting to bother me a bit due to the apparent difficulty in upgrading my systems. If I only had one machine this wouldn't be so bad, but...

So the poll here for curiosity. How many Gentoo boxes do you maintain?

If you replicate boxes where @world and USE (include CPU_FLAGS) are the same, count that as just one machine.
Count virtual machines separately if they have their own @world and USE flags. Also do not count non-Gentoo (but you may add in Funtoo and any other distributions that use portage as long as you maintain them and not fire and forget).
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alamahant · Advocate Joined: 23 Mar 2019 Posts: 3918

One openrc,one systemd,one hybrid,some VMs and some lxc containers..

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saellaven · l33t Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 654

I'm currently at 6, but I update regularly and mostly use stable.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:46 pm Post subject:

How do you find time to maintain all of them (again, I excluded replicated machines as that's an obvious way though it's not always appropriate)? The per-machine time is taking longer and longer to figure out all the conflicts is making me think again, else I'd be adding more machines.

I think I'm up to 7 machines I must keep up to date, and 3 more I'd like to keep up to date. Every single one has a different setup, some openrc, some systemd, it's been chaos and becoming a huge time sink. Them also being a mixture of stable and individually unmasked package makes it harder. I suspect running unstable would be even worse.

Currently I'm in the 32-bit phase of updating to 17.1 on my main workstation, as well as updating my VMM server and PVR (at same time). Thank goodness for distcc, but what I really need is distrust - cbindgen, firefox, and libsvg are starting to get annoying as they can't be distributed.

high priority (7)
- main workstation (64 bit) -- this one is usually hardest as it has the largest number of software packages installed
- VMM server (64)
- outward facing webserver on VM (32)
- 32 bit laptop
- 64 bit laptop
- 2xFriend's machines (remote, 32)

Medium priority (3)
- HTPC/PVR machine (64)
- disk backup server (32)
- old 64 bit workstation

Low priority
- old 32 bit laptop
- few other scratch machines

Not updated
- few others like my ia64 box because it got dropped from support for a lot of software... and a USB stick that I use as a rescue image that could be used as a makeshift workstation.
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Tony0945 · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:51 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 5:10 pm Post subject:

My chroot on the Gentoo ARM 64 build box.
X-Gene 1 which builds for the Pi4
Raspberry Pi 4, which uses a binhost.
Acer R13 Chromebook, also arm64, currently suffering from neglect.
HP Microserver G7, bare metal install for hosting KVMs.
Four KVMs in the above.
E35M-1 Silent System. Media Player. (I should upgrade this to a Pi4)
My main PC. (Phenom II)
Bare metal server install at Hetzner
Three KVMs in the above.

That's 15 but KVMs come and go.
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saellaven · l33t Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 654

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 5:37 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 5:42 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r,

every now and again, you need -N in place of -U and --keep-going is a good idea too.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 6:07 pm Post subject:

I figure a lot of VMs are throwaway VMs that aren't maintained - and thus shouldn't be counted in this poll.

For instance I have my VMM server running 4 VMs. The VMM server I count because it's Gentoo and I need to update it.
Then the VMs: one is a Gentoo VM that's outward facing. I count that. One is a pfSense VM... I don't count. Then there are two more VMs that are Gentoo but I don't update them. These I don't count these because I don't maintain them -- so total count of 2 for this one computer.

So basically I need to maintain one computer twice (not 4 times despite it having 4 copies of Gentoo installed) - and this is what I'm counting here.

saellaven - I'm surprised you're not running into the merge messes when updating. I really would like to keep more machines up to date, even the VMs mentioned above, but it just costs too much time especially when things get kicked out of the tree. How have your updates been going?
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 6:15 pm Post subject:

Updating daily doesn't keep problems from popping up.

Spent an hour the other day, figuring out why my old python2 ebuilds, in my local repo, were now complaining when I tried to do a changed-use run, and the complaints were about python and python-exec. Nothing on my end. Turned out to be a couple of python* eclass changes :roll:

Now, I'm adding eclasses to my local repo. Thanks gentoo devs :roll:

Edit to add: One thing that has helped, is emerging got a little better when I went from multilib to straight 64bit.

As far as machines, I have one main desktop/server/binhost/etc, one laptop (updated weekly) and one small webserver that I don't count, as it's gentoo, but I never update it, when the hardware dies is when it gets updated.

Well, I'm just about to start playing with 32bit chroots (as an alternative to multilib), gentoo and funtoo.

ETA2: I just checked (out of curiosity) and after hiding the python* eclasses in my local repo, it was working today. I just love it when they start changing things, that are out of sight, it works ... it doesn't work ... it works ~le sigh~

But it does look like the kind of straightened out the mess they made re python2 "removal"
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saellaven · l33t Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 654

I update daily with

emerge -a --update --changed-use --with-bdeps=y --deep --keep-going --autounmask @world

When things I need get kicked out of the tree, I move them into my overlay.

It's been a few months since the last time I had much of an issue (or maybe I'm so used to dealing with certain things, I'm mentally ignoring them at this point). Like i said, a lot of the things I run into are because of devs that should know better not thinking about what they're doing before committing.

With regard to python, I had a few issues maybe 6 months ago, but nothing much as of late (though, like I said, I'm expecting 2.7 to break stuff soon). elogind has been my most recent headache that I can think of, but it's more of an annoyance (I really, really, really hate that it decides to consume my tty rather than outputting errors to the tty while launching X on vt7, but I haven't had time to investigate that yet to see if I can unbreak that bit of stupidity... I mean, who needs to see errors that don't get logged to X.org.log anyway, right?)

I don't remember the last time I had a perl issue.

I'm not sure what I might be doing differently than you... I know I've kept a lot of my saellavenisms from my pre-gentoo days, when I put together my own distro for my computers, so that might unknowingly factor in somewhere (over the years, I've seen (and avoided) a whole lot of gentoo devs do or recommend things that really make me scratch my head since they're more likely to break things and make systems unstable). I can state with certainty that a lot of my personal scripts, utils, and .config type files have migrated with me for 26+ years of using linux, though not all of them are going to keep gentoo from breaking. Maybe it's more of a mindset I have in how I manage my boxes, I don't know (which is a big reason why you've seen me opposing certain ideas from certain devs over the years).
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Zucca · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 6:50 pm Post subject:

3.

Desktop, laptop and home server.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 7:42 pm Post subject:

I sure hope this latest update saga is an exception versus a rule for the future with all these use and slot conflicts. It's not like these just showed up either, they showed up months ago and I put it off until now.

Yes going only 64-bit mode probably simplifies things a bit, just to reduce number of packages installed. Then again they're the same package for 32/64...

As an aside, I've only updated one amd64 box to 17.1 - it's one of the mid priority machines as that one I can sacrifice during this learning curve. I'm in progress of migrating my main workstation to 17.1 - it's currently recompiling the 32-bit libraries. I'm _very_ worried about killing my server when doing the migration, at least it's up to date now as the first step. I'm currently updating my PVR so I can do the migration, and I need to clean up and update my 64-bit laptop before I can do the migration.

I still have a lot of work is pending *sigh* and having lots of boxes is an even bigger *sigh* ...
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 7:51 pm Post subject:

There were a few reasons for going straight 64, the emerge time wasn't particularly one of them, the abi 32 stuff I got tired of, so that was one reason.
Another I moved away from wine (it only worked on some of the things I wanted to run), so I opted to put together an old machine strictly for that reason.
Although I've been wanting to play with wine again (just to see what improvements have been made), I think I will do it by way of a i686 chroot instead of multilib or vm.
By going straight 64bit I also had an easy time with 17.0 -> 17.1 by making a bastardized profile, keeping */lib and */lib64 as symlinks, and not recompiling even one package. Though I could have kept the regular 17.1 and just removed one particular file that checks for the symlink and refuses to run if it sees it. But I would have to remove it after every sync.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20485

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a lot of "2" votes. One desktop and one laptop. I'm at one because I basically consider my laptop to be dead and is therefore unmaintained.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2021 2:01 am Post subject:

Honestly I'm both appalled and comforted there are a large number of people with more than five machines.

I suspect some of them are just reporting number of machines and not number of distinct setups being actively maintained which was the intent of the poll. I would have thought that once you get this many machines the aggregate time spent on all machines fixing conflicts as the portage tree moves on will become prohibitively time intensive... Or perhaps none of the machines have GUIs. But perhaps there are just slackers like me that if I don't see any serious GLSAs I let them slide for a while.
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Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2021 2:38 am Post subject:

Actually I reported the number of machines, but several have chroots also. And one machine doubles as a build box for big builds on another (ryzen building for k10). Also k10 building in a chroot for k6.

Ionen · Developer Joined: 06 Dec 2018 Posts: 2853

Only 3 for real boxes, but few other installs as well.

Updated daily:
- desktop, and server (server uses binpkgs and doesn't build anything), both ~amd64. These are updated together with a single script. Never gives me major problems, but it's ~testing so may get a build failure now and then. Not using stable for the server is questionable but I can do basic checks before pushing the binpkgs.

Only updated when I need it:
- 2nd desktop used for testing normality running amd64 stable. Uses systemd, a full gnome desktop, wayland, and other things I normally don't use. Never had problems with it, it just works. I could use a VM instead (like I do for win10 with GPU passthrough) but might as well put the hardware to use, that old i7-2600 still compiles fine.
- a prefix installation used for testing, still no real problems but prefix is more out there.
- a x86, and musl chroot for testing (may add more, like arm64 with qemu), along my own system I tend to use overlayfs over those for testing (while keeping most binpkgs for re-use). musl support is kind of up in the air so I don't expect much there. Still developing the whole testing env stuff though, the overlayfs deletes native-symlinks by default and gives the bugzilla tinderbox nagging experience.

I have no laptop anymore

But I'd likely treat it like the server with binpkgs if I did.

I might add that I've never, not once, had problems dealing with python -- or anything really, my experience with gentoo been mostly smooth sailing. I also don't use overlays except my own.

Most installations share the same /etc/portage tracked in git that loads different files based on the machine along with common-for-all settings. Server also mirror the gentoo repo and everything syncs with it only when needed, also nginx distfiles cache given propagating mounts everywhere can be pain and a cache mirror does the job. Server also does some CI for my local overlay like merging changes from gentoo using that mirror'ed repo, and spams me with filtered commit mail.

superjaded · l33t Joined: 05 Jul 2002 Posts: 802

My main desktop is probably the only system that qualifies as unique by the criteria outlined by OP, but that desktop also has at least 4 different configurations between the main system, the VMs and binhost that I manage on it.

haibane: The actual system running amd64 with a smattering of stuff from ~amd64. This machine more or less does everything I need from a server: my wireguard server, docker and my fileserver. It's also my daily driver desktop and virtualization station. I have the hardware setup for PCI passthrough so the below VMs are used with GPU acceleration typically.
gentoo-plasma-unstable: VM I use to mess around with "unstable" desktop stuff, ACCPET_KEYWORDS="~amd64", Currently running plasma 5.21 beta
gentoo-plasma-git: VM running ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" but also plasma from git.
binhost chroot ("intel-stable"): A chroot I manage to act as a binhost for my laptop and intel NUC.

The world file is going to be largely the same between all four of those systems, but they're all managed a little differently. haibane has quite a bit of server-type stuff on it while the VMs are just desktop specific stuff for the most part. I also manage USE flags independently, but since they're largely the same use case, the USE flags are not going to vary particularly wildly between each other.

Honestly, I'd argue that the binhost that I manage for the two machines that consume binaries from it was actually a little more difficult to get right than managing the other systems independently. The binary package system is a little more finicky BECAUSE it requires your configuration between the various machines involved to be more or less the same in order to be able to take advantage of those binaries. It probably would have been easier just to manage those systems independently (even if more time consuming in the long run), but I wanted those systems not to have to do much compiling.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2021 3:54 am Post subject:

Yeah I think my topic wording could have been better chosen though I think my explanation should be close. I think I did not clearly indicate the reason for this poll: see how many unique setups any one particular person maintains.

Since a "Gentoo Machine" sort of implies physical hardware, I might be requesting an undercount as I'd like virtual machines and chroots that are maintained separately should be counted separately - if one

# chroot /this_new_chroot
# emerge --sync
# emerge --update @world

... I'd like something like this counted as another "machine" (unless if you also use --usepkgonly !).

It also could be an overcount if someone counts a machine they don't maintain - either a physical machine or a stage3 tarball one dumps out and never updates it, whether it's used in an airgap or not. Perhaps I'd like honeypots not be counted - though they are "used" but generally honeypots were meant to be exploited and upgrading software kind of defeats the purpose. So in this respect, I specifically mean "maintain" as one again "emerge --update @world" (and goes through cleaning up the fallout) in some respect on any root filesystem - virtual or not, chroot or not.

Perhaps a poll of "How many hours do you spend updating any Gentoo system every month" is a better poll of update effort, but that too has a lot of polling holes...
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20485

figueroa · Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:35 am Post subject:

I'm only just recently down to 6. A year ago I was also keeping up all the desktops plus two servers at a small private school, but now that's just down to one server + a VM and the other machines at school are either Mint or MX. The school is now 600 miles remote to me. There is someone there to take care of the hardware.

Two get updated daily as a practical matter: an x86 machine (my old AMD Phenom desktop) that just does server functions, and my main amd64 i7 desktop.

Two other get updated more-or-less every few weeks: testing box here and server at school, both older AMD Athlon x2

My ancient Celeron laptop which gets updated about monthly, usually having to run at least overnight.

The VM (no X11) at school, which is mission critical, but now never updated. It ran the school admin system for 10 years and is needed to generate older student transcripts, which it does on-the-fly. (I keep this VM turned off and keep several clones of the VM running -- but off -- on multiple machines.)

That's six, but maybe I should just count the 5 that I update. I'm becoming a slacker.

I did once (2006) set up and run about 10 Gentoo PCs to support a two-week deployed (civilian) situation, but they were all clones of one machine and just given unique hostnames. That was fun. Afterwards the machines were all given to non-profits -- some went into the school and I continued to support them for many years.
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superjaded · l33t Joined: 05 Jul 2002 Posts: 802