Arch in a production environment

kikinovak · 2008-04-16 18:49:16

Hi,

It's been two weeks now since I (re-re-re-)discovered Arch. A long-time Slackware user before (though I've tried them *all* out ), I've kept an eye on that snappy little distro since it sort of sprang from Crux. I gave it a spin from time to time and saw the great potential, but there was always the odd showstopper that prevented me from using it on a 100% day to day basis.

Well, the last version has been tested for something like ten days, 12 hours a day, with a very long checklist. And it's perfect ( minor annoyances aside, but I'm not anal about them). So I've just began installing it in our public libraries. Here's our minimal Arch desktop:

http://www.microlinux.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=8

Base system, X11, customized Slim login manager, XFCE (with customized menus that don't appear on the screenshots), handful of apps. It's just replaced CentOS as our main desktop.

Huge pat on the shoulders of all developers! Thanks for the good work!

anakin · 2008-04-16 18:54:40

It's always nice to see that Arch can suit pretty much any situation. Nice minimal desktop!

anakin · 2008-04-16 19:05:37

It's also nice to see another business based on the opensource model. Has Microlinux been successful among small enterprises or mainly with associations and medium sized companies?

Misfit138 · 2008-04-16 19:57:17

Very cool!
Glad Arch is the distro of choice.

finferflu · 2008-04-16 22:20:35

I'm quite curious about how you upgrade all those machines. Do you upgrade regularly? And how do you make all the adjustments for all the machines?
Those are the problems I would see using Arch outside of the home desktop computer: mainly maintainance.

kikinovak · 2008-04-17 05:01:01

Thanks for the nice comments. Let me answer your questions.

Has Microlinux been successful among small enterprises or mainly with associations and medium sized companies?

I don't know, because it's not created yet My contract with the local libraries ends in August, and I will then continue as freelance consultant. I'm just currently building the website and hosting some docs on it.

I'm quite curious about how you upgrade all those machines. Do you upgrade regularly? And how do you make all the adjustments for all the machines?
Those are the problems I would see using Arch outside of the home desktop computer: mainly maintainance.

In my office, I have one PIV that is dedicated to two tasks, and only these two: 1) it's a central buildbox, so package building happens here. 2) It has some spare partitions to act as a sandbox. Whenever I'm not sure about what I'm doing, tweaking some system innards, etcetera, I always give it a shot first on one of the sandbox partitions.

As for the adjustments: I try to "package" my default configurations as much as possible, like I did with Slackware before. Check out my repo on http://kikinovak.free.fr/archlinux/os/i686/ -> the config-* packages are mainly stuff that go in /etc/skel, so whenever a new user is added, he already has a nice default configuration without any tweaking. I also scribble down everything install-wise, so I end up with similar configurations: http://kikinovak.free.fr/archlinux/os/i … -HOWTO.txt

As for upgrading, well. It's not a server, so it's not exactly a Tamagotchi for upgrading. I keep a detailed ChangeLog of what happens on every upgrade on my buildbox, so I guess I'll do like one bigger upgrade every two or three months. At least, that's what I did when using CentOS. The idea is that Arch will make life more simple with that, since I had some machines running CentOS 4, other with CentOS 5. On the other hand, there's only one Arch.

Conclusion: though "bleeding edge", it's not a bloody mess I've seen fellow sysadmins running public computer rooms on Debian unstable or Gentoo with Enlightenment CVS (!!!), and things seemed to work out. I did try out nearly all of the major players among the desktop distros. (My views on Ubuntu, Mandriva and SuSE are unprintable )

There was one other candidate that was a close second: KateOS, a polish (and polished) Slackware-plus-XFCE distro. Unfortunately, they are lacking means, e. g. their servers are down very often. Plus, recently they've developed a nasty taste for configuration interfaces written in PHP (???).

finferflu · 2008-04-17 09:23:11

That's very interesting, and even though I have no experience in system maintainance apart from my home desktop, your solution sounds clever.
Allow me to ask you one more question: so when you decide to do the big upgrade every two or three months, do you have to go around all machines and make the needed changes one by one? Even though usually there are no major changes to do, it still sounds like a tiresome job.

Last edited by finferflu (2008-04-17 09:23:28)

kikinovak · 2008-04-17 16:40:01

Allow me to ask you one more question: so when you decide to do the big upgrade every two or three months, do you have to go around all machines and make the needed changes one by one?

More or less, yes. I know some people have comfortable solutions for this, but IMHO these solutions leave the path of the KISS principle. But my approach is no different than most users here: # init 3, # pacman -Syu, reboot, check if it boots, check if X starts again, check if everything is still there. I think the fact that my desktop is rather lightweight makes it easier to maintain than, say, the whole kitchen sink of GNOME or KDE or (God forbid) both.

Here's my full-blown bells-and-whistles desktop... base system, X11, XFCE desktop environment, one app per task:

[kikinovak@bertha:~] $ pacman -Q | wc -l
484

And this could be further stripped down, because out of sheer comfort, I checked all package groups on the core install CD. Now compare that to CentOS 5, where the *minimal* system (the one you get when you uncheck all package groups) consists of 343 packages. No X11, no sound, nothing. Makes you wonder.

Last edited by kikinovak (2008-04-17 16:40:49)

Ruckus · 2008-04-18 14:16:18

If all the machines have the same or similar specs, I'd setup a server with a snapshot of the OS, and have the clients net boot to it, and simply update that image with the new updates.

Good job though.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-04-16 18:49:16

Arch in a production environment

#2 2008-04-16 18:54:40

Re: Arch in a production environment

#3 2008-04-16 19:05:37

Re: Arch in a production environment

#4 2008-04-16 19:57:17

Re: Arch in a production environment

#5 2008-04-16 22:20:35

Re: Arch in a production environment

#6 2008-04-17 05:01:01

Re: Arch in a production environment

#7 2008-04-17 09:23:11

Re: Arch in a production environment

#8 2008-04-17 16:40:01

Re: Arch in a production environment

#9 2008-04-18 14:16:18

Re: Arch in a production environment

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