Gentoo Imaging and mass deployments -where to start?[Solved]

[njcwotx]

Greetings. I have been working on a little project at home. I created a solid state gentoo box to act as a gateway and simple security device. It works fairly well. However, I want to experiment with different configurations and additional packages. I want to be able to reproduce and re-image different installs so I don't have to begin from scratch if I jack up the configs. Also, moving one step beyond, I thought I could possibly use this system to create an installer or live CD when I perfect the install.

I am not necessarily looking for step by steps just yet. Right now I am brainstorming my options to I know what methods to research.

Thanks.
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[kingfame_147]

Is that box some sort of production enviroment?!

If not, you could give btrfs a shot. Simply do snapshots from whatever configs you created. Then you can simply start the different snapshots whenever you need them.

[njcwotx]

Right now its a home router/security appliance.

Its compeletely solid state. no CD drive. Btrfs could work as a change recovery technology and is certainly worth checking out. However, I also want to be able to image the drive completely. 1. as a backup 2. as a way to mass produce the device (not retail scale, but I can see where we may need to image this device 10 to 100 times).

I also want to build a live cd version if possible.

I recently purchased another solid state computer to make a workstation network admin device. They are fairly small. Check out digital engine DE2700 and there are others. MSI makes a really nice dual nic device, but its more expensive. I drop in an SSD and I have a 1.6Ghz computer with sound and DVI out. Im going to make another device that isnt a firewall, but a security sniffer, network trouble shooting and monitoring build. We have a lot of remote customers and having a solid state box we can use remotely can come in handy. Using MRTG, Ntop, Nagios, etc. We can create a network admin toolbox we can mount to a wall or drop on a rack that generates little heat and noise. I just dont want to rebuild each time I need an new one.

There is also raspberry pi on the way....
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[The Doctor]

You could make a stage 4 tarball. http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Custom_Stage4

Form your first post, I think that is kind of the direction you were heading...
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[njcwotx]

Yes, the stage 4 looks good, I will give this a try for sure. Got my next little box in mail today, now I can play with a few different builds without having to buy multiple ssd's.
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Always thirsting.

[njcwotx]

I created a stage 4 tarball, tried to expand it on a vm and didn't have immediate luck, but I think I can resolve it.

I did however on attempt 2 try to boot off my de2700, then proceed to install gentoo on a cf card I put in the slot.

basically I formatted /dev/sdb (the cfcard device, I was running from my ssd on /dev/sda) with the partitions set just like my ssd, and mounted it into /mnt/gentoo......and after mounting the boot partition and extracting the stage4 (mine has the boot files), and setting grub, I was able to remove my ssd and boot off the cf card in a perfect state of clone as if I was on the SSD (except the CF is a slower IO). I had to use df to make sure the cf card was what I was really using.

Good tip, im marking solved, but, any further discussions can continue....
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Always thirsting.