Gentoo for All the Unusual Reasons

Consider these problems happening not only on a single desktop, but in the context of a production platform of dozens of servers or thousands of workstations. Frankly, there aren't many operating systems out there that give you much help here. There's an entire body of literature on the subject of infrastructure management. Sadly, a great deal of ad hoc deployment still occurs. Although many vendors have tools that help you build a series of systems the first time, the task of maintaining them over time is left to the individual site to handle. The newer version problem isn't about single machines, it's about entire networks of them.

So how does Gentoo stack up in production environments? Here's another surprise for you from the source-based distribution: Portage can be told to build binary packages. This allows you to have one machine over in the corner doing all the compilation work. Then, the packages can be shared and used by all your target machines, instead of them having to build the packages themselves. You might be tempted to say “isn't that what the other Linux distributions do?” The difference is selecting the right mix of packages is a site decision, and the newer version problem definitely is a site burden to deal with. Gentoo gives local systems teams the tools to deal with solving these version issues themselves.

By using a local build server you can concentrate horsepower and version management effectively, yet still have room for local customization. Staging environments are easy to set up. Then, once you're happy with the set of versions you've tested, you simply make a snapshot of those binary packages and share them out to your rank-and-file machines. Recent versions of Portage include built-in support for fetching binary packages you've created from local file servers, so all of this works right out of the box.

Create your own package or privately version-bump an existing one—the newer version problem comes up all the time. The more mainstream package management tools, although mature, require a much greater level of effort to accomplish these tasks. Conceptually, though, the tasks are trivial. Quite to my surprise, because they don't advertise this aspect, the design of Gentoo's tools makes it easy to do these tasks yourself.

The author would like to thank Stephen White from the University of Adelaide and Andrea Barisani from the University of Trieste for having helped develop the ideas here as they relate to production use of Gentoo. They also kindly reviewed the article, as did Pia Smith of Linux Australia, Jeff Waugh of GNOME, Craige McWhirter of the Sydney Linux Users Group and Wade Mealing of the Gentoo Server Project.