I've come to the realization that while my linode fulfills it's intended purpose (and does so very well), it is not suitable for doing package management Gentoo-style. What I'd like to do is use my very fast home PC to build an image and then extract a tarball of that image on my linode.

What I had in mind was having a disk image and configuration profile that would boot my linode into something like a LiveCD that would have minimal software and allow me to mount my regular partitions and then upload and extract the tarball of my image that was built on my own PC.

Has anyone ever done something like this before and have advice or reading material on the subject?

Erik

Rather than transferring the entire image, you may want to look into using 'emerge --buildpkg' and quickpkg. That's not a bad idea though.

Yes, of course... but I guess also had in mind having some sort of rescue/restore functionality from the liveCD image where I would be also able to deploy an entirely new fully-functional system--not necessarily just software updates..

I've done some work on this and what I've done is installed debian on a modest 1024 MB image on which I will store backup tarballs. I can also use this config profile to boot into somewhat of a rescue OS where I can mount my main partitions and restore them from the tarballs.

That being said, I can also download these tarballs and restore them to my very fast home PC, chroot into it (ala "Faketoo"), and then do all my package updates from there. Of course, using this method means you have to actually bring your server down to perform the restore operation, but it usually doesn't take very long and it improves update times exponentially.

Another thing I've done with promising results is to do the Faketoo style restore on my home system and then build binary packages. This way I can just have emerge use the binary package tarballs to perform updates. Doing it this way means you don't have to reboot your server!

Hopefully this will serve to reduce the load on some hosts

Maybe I can work up a HOWTO on the subject

That would be awesome, post it on the wiki if you get the chance, I'm interested to see how you have it setup.

I posted something simple on the tips/tricks forum for now.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1688