Thoughts on a private portage profile

pdouble

The company I work for is trying to adopt an easy to maintain system that keeps all the servers we manage up to date with the latest packages and security fixes. Currently we are using RedHat "just because", without really considering the maintanence issues. Having to use a CD to upgrade between versions though does not sit well with me. I think portage is a much better solution. The issue though is being on the bleeding edge, which I prefer in my own machine, but for servers we desire more control.

I thought a good solution would be to setup a machine to be our own portage tree and point all our servers to it for "emerge rsync". This machine would be kept in sync witht he official portage tree. Then I would add a special profile that specified only the package versions we wanted on the machine, to keep things from always on the bleeding edge. Someone would be monitoring security issues and such and when necessary would update the profile to allow the new packages. We could then upgrade each machine using "emerge rsync ; emerge -u world" as usual. Possibly putting a daily "emerge rsync ; emerge -u world" in a cron job, although I'm not too sure about that part of it.

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or possibly others threads or docs on this type of setup?

Lovechild · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 1:53 pm Post subject:

now that's a good idea if I ever saw one - when it works will you please post a how to in the documentation area ?

pdouble · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 1:56 pm Post subject:

roXet · n00b Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 26

very nice idea. I am running a small webserver on Mandrake right now (I set it up before I discovered Gentoo) and I am having major problems with dependancies and RPM, I really don't know how anyone manages that easily... I am going to switch that server to gentoo soon and I would be interested in seeing how this was done. =)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

A future version of portage is rumored to include this feature. How far in the future, I have no idea. Something to keep in mind while working on your interim solution.
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pdouble · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 3:40 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I haven't read anything specific. I'll PM rac and see if he has anything to point to.
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Lovechild · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 5:19 pm Post subject:

I remember it being slated for Portage2 (The C version) but alas that died a rather horrible and loud death.
Same goes for parallel downloading, distributed compilation support, proper CVS support and all the nice stuff people talked about.

rac · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 6:49 pm Post subject:

Reckless rumormongerer reporting for duty. I was referring to https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5622, in which drobbins discusses his intent to allow fine-grained masking and unmasking of packages on a per-profile basis.
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pdouble · Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 7:41 pm Post subject:

That sounds like pretty much the approach I'm planning on taking, except I'll be creating my own profile (by copying one first...) as opposed to applying a modification to an existing profile.

Thanks for the info. Does anyone see a drawback or danger in doing things this way?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

I would be cautioous about upgrading portage after I implemented something like this. You might keep your eye open for a future version of portage that does this so you can migrate safely.

Here is the Portage changelog.
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