[SlugLUG] Debian As A Server

[Erich Blume]

It's terribly bad form to leave out -av on ANY emerge.

So make that "emerge -uDav world". This will spit out a verbose and (if
you're in an ANSI-color terminal) color-coded list of every package that is
going to get emerged. That's -v, of course, and then -a prompts you if you'd
like to begin the emerge.

So, before hitting the sack, use "emerge -uDav world", check what's being
brought in, start it up, and let it run.

Also, after doing a -uD world, it's a good idea to run revdep-rebuild to
make sure the Deep dependency search didn't leave any packages stranded.
Updating GCC in particular tends to break things.

Failing that, though (like if your update is scripted), a log is kept in
"/var/log/emerge.log". It'll take some parsing, but it does keep track of
everything, even if you run multiple concurrent emerges (which makes parsing
the file really, really annoying - trust me, I've tried.)

Hope that helps.

On a side note: I've had Gentoo "break" on me twice now. That's when the
dependency tree just get so borked and binaries are breaking everywhere that
I just scrap the whole thing, back up my data, and re-install from scratch.
Both of those two times were direct results of an "emerge -uDav world". I
generally "emerge -uav world" every night following my nightly "emerge
--sync", and do a "emerge -uDav world" only when the mood fits me, usually
once a month at most. I figure that -D won't catch anything I can't catch
myself by having a program break down on me or have a package fail to
compile.

Erich

P.S.: Rohan, sorry, I replied to you accidentally.

On 6/12/06 2:23 PM, "Rohan Sheth" <rohan at rohan.ws> wrote:

> This here appear thing sounds interesting.  I'll have to toy with it.
> Watching shit scroll on my screen for a few hours while Gentoo plays
> update is somewhat boring...
> 
> Night emerge -uD world sounds good...but does it log the updates
> somewhere?  I would probably want to know if something important was
> updated (new kernel, new apache, new php, etc.)
> 
> --Rohan
> 
> cerise at armory.com wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 10:16:15AM -0700, Rohan Sheth wrote:
>> [ snip ]
>>   
>>> Gentoo is another distro I have run on machines for a while...and
>>> it has interesting aspects.  The whole build-from-source thing has the
>>> "cool" factor...but functionality increases are fairly low and I find it
>>> more to be a hassle to compile things like X.org considering they take a
>>> decent amount of time.
>>>     
>> 
>>    You, my friend, need appear.  It even seems to be in a mostly working
>> state at the moment.
>>    http://l.armory.com/~cerise/appear-latest.tbz2
>>    It changes the build process from a foreground application to a background
>> service.  So when you type emerge, it verifies that the command is valid,
>> submits it to a daemon service if it's backgroundable, and cranks away
>> without
>> your attention.
>>    It makes nightly emerge -u -D world's great.  I haven't seen boogeyman
>> compile in years, but I know it does by the logs the next morning.
>> 
>>   
>>> The Hardened factor of Gentoo is again
>>> interesting, they are gone to great lengths to include security features
>>> and they have documented them quite nicely.
>>>     
>> 
>>    They're also one of the foremost in SELinux integration.  Actually, if you
>> REALLY want to run something different, SELinux is the way to go.  What's
>> cooler than having a root account that can't do anything?
>> 
>> -Phil/CERisE
>> 
>> 
>>   
> 
> 
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