Farm synchronization

[C. P. Ghost]

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 06:17:34PM +0400, Oleg Lutchenko wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> Is there any regular way to synchronize installed packages in the farm of
>> FreeBSD servers quickly.
>
> Forget packages. Here is wat I do to keep the ports on a couple of machines in
> sync.
>
> - Ports are built and installed on a single powerfull workstation, the build machine.
> - After updating the build machine (using portsnap and portmaster), the
>  /usr/local and /var/db/pkg directories from that machine are distributed to
>  the dependent machines using rsync(1).
> - You may need to exclude /usr/local/etc from rsync, or use a script to change files in
>  that directory afterwards to account for different hostnames and or IP
>  addresses! I tend to keep config files for every machine in a git
>  repository on my workstation, merge any chances from the updates and roll
>  them out to the dependent machines.
> - Note that if you use ports that install kernel modules, you'll need to sync
>  /boot/modules as well!
> - On the dependent machines, the /usr/ports directory is removed to save space.
>
> This solution has made my life a lot easier.

I'm doing this on a farm of over 500 FreeBSD machines for years now.
Works perfectly, and is a huge time saver.

> Roland
> --
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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-cpghost.

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