Looking for opinions/ideas on a setup

[madchaz]

Here is my situation.

I'm seting up a server to run subversion. So far so good, everything is working exactly as I want it to.

My setup involves using apache to handle the connections, because we want https and good security management.

Now, the catch. We want to be able to easily "clone" the application and it's data. To clone the data, it's just a mather of export, import. However, for the binaries, that's not really a solution as a lot of things appear to be hardcoded in the binaries.

For apache, I was thinking of building it in /apache, then moving it to the dev or prod environment (as needed) and running it chrooted. This way, I can more easily controle where everything is.

I could probably do the same with SVN, but because I will mostly be using svnadmin, that's rather impractical. I can probably use links or fake mounts so that the users endup with the right environment, but that fells a bit messy to me.

Does anyone have other ideas or opinions on what I just presented?
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Someone asked me once if I suffered from mental illness. I told him I enjoyed every second of it.

[adaptr]

If those production machines are also running Gentoo (and they had better; never develop on a system you won't be running on!) just build an exact copy of a production machine in your development environment, checkout the code, build it there, then copy the binary to the production environment.
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>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

[Kruegi]

I did not fully get it. Do you want to offer muliple services for multiple user or do you want to clone it to several machines?
In the first case it makes not much sense to handle the webserver and svn installations on a per user basis.
Just do one secure setup of Apache, create a repository for every account and secure it.
There are several Apache options available to devide the users.

Thomas

[madchaz]

Guess I wasn't clear. Sorry about that. Some information

1: No, unfortunatly, the systems aren't on gentoo. I wish they were, but they aren't. However, the question would still apply if it was gentoo.

2: My situation is as followed. I have a single machine. The apache/svn combination will need to be very high avalability. As such, we don't want to make ANY changes in the "production" environment. To be able to test new versions of, say, apache, we need to be able to "clone" the installation. This includes both the data AND the binaries.

3: We need control on where the binaries are located. This is because we try and keep binaries in a specific mount (/u03) As such, I wouldn't be able to use say portage (if I was on gentoo) to install, as it would chose it's own folders. As such, I'm building strait from the apache source. (./configure; make && make install)

Now, to keep the test and production software completly seperate, I am using 2 different users. One is called "dev" the other "prod". dev and prod have 0 rights on each other's folders. As such, it needs to be impossible for anything running under the dev user to touch prod files.

Normaly, any changes will be done as follow.

1: Install new patch in dev.
2: Do testing
3: Clone to prod

Now the issue is that I can't really copy the binaries from dev to prod, because it tries to use libraries in the /u03/dev folder. The solution I have right now is to basicaly re-do the same process I did to install in dev, but this is a "last resort" kind of solution, as my manager would rather just have me copy the files.

Anyone as an idea?
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Someone asked me once if I suffered from mental illness. I told him I enjoyed every second of it.

[Zuu]

I have not done prod/dev stuff myself. However so far I know if you run production and development on the same machine it _can be_ a good idea to use virtual machines for dev and prod. Then they can be setup exactly the same. All paths will be the same etc.

Also you get other cool features. If it's true, and you are using xen, you will be able to move a running virtual machine from one host machine to another via LAN without stoping it. But then, things like routing and stuff come into play. How many packages will be lost etc.