Mass Gentoo Installation vs. Ubuntu???

[Lechium]

I'd go with something VERY stable and well supported.
You do not need bleeding edge -- the benefits are small, but headaches grow exponentially with the amount of machines you manage.

At that -- Debian seems like the best solution. It may be slowish with updates, but, hey, students will use fairly limited amount or software. Also does it matter if you have newest verion of GCC, or one that is 4 months old, if you're compiling college level code?

Another soluton is CentOS, the RH-derivative that is used in my univ enegeneering labs at the moment (~200-300 computers).

These two distros are very much designed with clusters in mind, which makes that attractive.
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[chrismortimore]

[Lechium]

[Omega21]

I would vote for ubuntu. I think the hardware detection is paramount.
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[durian]

[aidy]

[Quatrerwin]

I would say Ubuntu. If the admins really want to customize the distro they choose, there is a way to do it in Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't break nearly as much as Gentoo. I don't see Gentoo as being a practical distro for that kind of deployment. There is too much maintainance work involved.

[yoshi314]

[rafo]

I see that most people here recommend other distros than Gentoo. This leaves me a bit puzzled; if Gentoo is often a good choice for a power user, then why is it not a good choice for a power administrator?

Let me first of all underline that my personal sysadmin experience is quite modest: I have kept small collections of Solaris and Red Hat boxes in shape, but that's about it. I have never had the full responsibility of a large campus where everything has to Just Work, and all the time too.

My line of thinking is this: A Gentoo solution would certainly take some time to set up initially, as there is no HOWTO (yet). And before that some time should be invested in deciding on local policies, like what hardware to support, which desktop(s), what security infrastructure, etc (this kind of planning is of course required regardless of chosen distro).

The payback can be expected in the long run. With other distros there would be "big" upgrades when a new set of CDs are issued, and the changes coming with such an upgrade would have to be evaluated against local policies and scriptware. After a period of extensive testing, involving perhaps a group of pilot users, the new release can be made available for everyone to use.

With a Gentoo solution it should be possible to largely avoid these periods of hectic upgrade-related work. Upgrades can be deployed on a per-package on-demand basis, without heavy spikes of workload for sysadmins and pilot users.

Perhaps there is also a transparency advantage. When there is a new release of a "boxed" distro there may not be that much documentation on how individual packages have changed. And the focus may be that the upgraded package should Just Work in a single-computer environment, but will it also work in a PXE boot environment?

With Gentoo on the other hand non-trivial changes will never happen "behind the curtains". The ebuild files and the ChangeLog are in the open, and there is likely to be a forum thread where you can get information and advice, plus sometimes official HOWTOs, plus the wiki. And, if an upgrade seems doubtful, just let it mature for some time while gathering understanding.

As a user in a "campus" environment I would be quite happy to know that there will be no "big bang" periods when many applications and procedures change at the same time. After all, isn't it always the case that the big bang comes just when your personal workload is at its highest too?

[tageiru]

[jpsmith]

You might want to consider thin clients + blade servers


You could consider enterprise monitoring installation software, that exists for the control, monitoring and installation of workstation or client images
--as well as client imaging software like Norton's Ghost or do it with linux tools tar or some other backup software (backup to dvd. cd or tape)

You might also want to check out some school board sites in the USA , where they have the problems of malfeasance by students/staff (viruses, installing software locally etc etc) for ideas on remote installation, workstation imaging/archiving/backups, and in general some type of remote control operation to FIX problems that may happen with not completely locked down workstations (non kiosk mode of operation)
--or use Linux LTSP (linux terminal servers) with XEN or VMware or some other such system to get an easier to monitor client running (a thin client), while still allowing functional and complete operation with your specific applications
--another way of fixing this is to use live cdroms which are of course slow to boot, but at least allow complete interaction locally without the danger of destroying files or systems ?

Example that immediately comes to mind is Novell's Zenworks workstations or servers, of course it mainly will reflect their Suse OS, which is also a very good Linux
--as an example, here is part of their setup documentation
http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bt056w8.html
http://www.novell.com/documentation/nld/nld_deployment/data/bvpwo6a.html
--replacing an NT server with linux
http://citnews.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.html
I personally like Novell and have considered themn the best since their netware days, even against Microsoft's glitzy semi-integration of their own technologies (like exchange, office sharepoint and so on)
--So something like Novells, NDS (e-Directory), Nsure (single sign on, identity control) or more genrally a open source LDAP

BUT FIRST get the infrastructure planning working correctly, maybe do a test lab to run the installation, you don't need many machines to do this (depends on the services you want to try)
--servers, web, mail, directory, security + the number of workstation types you want to use

A) I would also standardise on a workstation type, vendor (and buy all ws from the same with the parts including motherboard fiormware set and processor stepping level specified)
==you could go Dell or some other national supplier or you could get a build quote form some custom builder, amybe even some of the linux builders


Compaq's document on a lights out headless linux install
http://www.linux.com/howtos/Compaq-Remote-Insight-Board-HOWTO/index.shtml


Another enterprise system, is IBM's Tivoli
http://citnews.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.html

Using Linux to install Linux remotely (scripting needed ?)
http://linux2.arinet.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=135&Itemid=2
--Redhat description installing remotely
http://sourceforge.net/projects/howtorib

PXE boots (network boots)
http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html

--Linux journal article remotely installing Linux
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5465

[vibrokatana]

I remember seeing awhile back a management system that compared files between a master and the subnotes (actual machines) and would update/maintain the files across the entire system. If I had a large computer base with 200+ identicle machines I would use gentoo and a system like that. Plus system migrations would be relatively painless (if it worked properly)

The only problem I see is setting it so 200+ clients dont ask to download files at the same time, that would defeat the purpose
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[vibrokatana]

[jimstapleton]

my epxierinece:

When everythign works: Ubuntu is great, easy and relatively fast.
As soon as something breaks, which has happened to me a lot (never got the graphics working properly on my i950), fixing it can be a headache at best.

Gentoo takes longer to setup, but I've found the same thing I've found with BSD - if something breaks, it's a lot easier to fix than with other linux distros. It also has better driver support than BSD, but that's not important to this discussion...

Finally, if you are using older or slower hardware, compiling stuff on Gentoo is more reliable than any other Linux system I've used, especially portage. Also you can distributed compile apparantly, as well as make packages with your compilations - with many systems the time requirements are thus vastly reduced for the compilation steps, most importantly, you can do it once for many systems by making the packages. Lastly, since you can have custom build flags redily available for your system, you can make older or slower working systems run better.


My thoughts on this setup? Give Ubuntu a shot on a sample machine of each configuration - if it works fine on them, keep it. If not, switch to Gentoo, in the short run it'll potentially cost a bit more time/effort, but in the long run it should actually pan out to be a good idea.

[vibrokatana]

how in the world did I quote myself?
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[kenjiru]

you should use Ubuntu

[renrutal]

I'd go with Gentoo personally, it's really the distro that I'm the most used to. But I see you have more than one admin, so there are different opinions and knowledge about everything.

Of course, I wouldn't be an update-happy admin, first I'd download and test it in the build server, then and finally deploy it. Unfortunatelly, most lab admins don't have the patience to plan things before they do them.

Further, I'd look for are automation tools, specially Gentoo-tailored ones. SSH'ing and emerging things manually in a huge lab is a pain.

[playfool]

For minimal maintance why not consider something like CentOS?