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Old 4th April 2009
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
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Being fortunate, I've only the care of my home machines (3 workstations, 1 server), and remotely a pair of servers from afar, to worry about over such things.


When it comes to updates via source, you can do the compiles on a suitable machine and then network mount /usr/src and /usr/obj on the other servers - a similar arrangement can be done with /usr/ports/packages, or the entire ports tree. /etc/make.conf can be setup to build a number of kernels with the KERNCONF directrive (KERNCONF=conf1 conf2 conf3 ...), and the other servers can choose which to install if they need different kernels. (see make.conf(5) for details).

When it comes to the feasibility of cross compiling on a sparc64 for an x86 and vice versa, that I'll leave to someone else to answer - because I only have access to x86-32 / x86-64 chips here. You will at least be able to share between systems of the same architecture.


Quote:
Originally Posted by WaBBiT View Post
Is it possible to manage all config files in /etc and /usr/local/etc in all 3 servers from the main server? (the gateway)
Use a version control system. FreeBSD provides SCCS, RCS, and CVS in the base. Something like git or bazaar-ng (bzr) might be more suitable in some situations, but CVS should be suitable. Your main server (or a delegate) would host the central repository, from which the others would checkout from. The details depend on how your software. In a few weeks/months when I set this up on my own boxes, it'll be driven by git and ssh.

Version control systems can be tricky at first, but once learned are all very simple gizmos.
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