Lone Coder: VirtualBox on Vista with a Gentoo Guest

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 09:15:00PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> You don't ever have to reinstall Gentoo... until you do. Gentoo is a  
> useful learning tool but I don't have much use for it beyond that.  
> Granted, you don't have glibc changes that require *everything*,  
> including the build toolchain, be rebuilt all over again all the time  
> but when it happens, the results are non-deterministic, or at least they  
> were up to two or three years ago. It didn't take me long to find tales  
> of woe on the Gentoo forums about how many passes people had to make  
> rebuilding things (and one more for good measure!) to (maybe) get  
> everything rebuilt and working. No thanks. I'll pass. Gentoo is nice if  
> you want to create a custom distro that only you can (maybe) maintain.

I don't consider gentoo a good learning tool.  I believe you learn a
lot more by poking at a well designed distribution and learning how a
really good design works and how it manages packages and keeps track
of everything.  Watching a compiler and make do it's thing teaches you
nothing useful.  It is quite boring in fact.

> Debootstrap in a virtual machine is an excellent way of deploying Debian  
> or its derivatives. That how we deploy both in Xen and OpenVZ virtual  
> machines in our hosting environment.
>
> Gentoo and Debian fans criticize Red Hat and derivatives because it  
> (supposedly) can't be upgraded in situ as Gentoo and Debian (supposedly)  
> can be. I've upgraded Fedora servers but I prefer to "nuke 'n pave",  
> especially since it's so trivially easy to do with Cobbler  
> <https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/>. I've upgraded Debian and Ubuntu  
> servers where I typically don't install X and a desktop manager or such  
> and it worked as advertised. Desktop machines are a different story, no  
> matter what the distro. With the big changes in KDE, for example,  
> upgrading really doesn't get you much since there is no way to migrate  
> some (many?) of the config files anyway.

Funny claim.  I have never reinstalled a debian machine.  It has never
been necesary.  My oldest currently running install was done in 1999.
I don't even know how many debian releases it has been through by now.

To me a reinstall is a sign of a very flawed distribution that isn't
well tested and isn't well designed.  With a proper system you can
upgrade the system while in use and most of the time the users of that
system won't even notice it happening.

> Let me just expand on Cobbler. Last week, I was at a client where I  
> demonstrated a hands-off, bare metal installation of CentOS 5.3, over  
> PXE. From selecting the PXE menu option to having a machine that was  
> ready for use, it was about 20 minutes, and that included creating  
> filesystems on a 1TB disk presented by hardware RAID. (The RAID set had  
> been created prior to the installation. It was left running over the  
> weekend building the array.)
>
> Once we had the working CentOS machine, to create another CentOS  
> installation in a Xen virtual machine was a matter of running "koan" and  
> pulling a kickstart installation from the Cobbler server. That took  
> another 10 minutes. By contrast, the first Xen installation I did back  
> in 2005, took me a *week*.
>
> I believe the Cobbler approach, particularly if it's used in conjunction  
> with a configuration management system like bcfg2, cfengine, puppet,  
> chef, etc., is a far better solution to systems management than doing in  
> situ upgrades and ad hoc systems administration that often accompanies  
> that practice. If the cost of recreating the environment is so high that  
> you value in situ major upgrades over bare metal installations, you have  
> a problem. You most likely have an environment that can't be replicated  
> in a reasonable amount of time, if it can be replicated at all, which  
> does not bode well for disaster recovery.

Being able to do multiple installs from a template is nice.  It is no
excuse for not making upgrades just work though.  Using it as an excuse
for why you don't have to support upgrades properly is simply crap.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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