First off: I live. Breathe and such. Work a bit too much and need to clear my head. Got my hair cut&dyed (first haircut for… 8 years?) and I’m generally okay. Glad you cared, if all you wanted was a life sign, then you probably want to stop reading now.
Skay, So lets talk technology.
Hardware:
I have a couple of small Via Epia systems ( Centaur VIA Samuel 2 CPU + box and board) your basic (old) micro-atx. These days they are probably considered “obsolete power hogs”. I run it with a 512MB CF disk + 512MB RAM ( With an IDE->CF bridge. no DMA mode available) . So, not very big and fast, but still quite neat for what I want it to do. ( And it lacks fans)
Software:
Currently it is running a version of Gentoo Linux, Stripped and Slimmed. The installation has been in place for a few years now, Gentoo works quite well here. Why Gentoo? Well, none of the working “firewall distributions” had documentation on disk usage or comments on what other than their fancy-gui I could be doing once it was installed. I wanted to do a bit more than just firewall off it. Also, I was quite intimately involved in Gentoo some time ago, and I still know how the system works and hangs together.
So currently it does NAT/Firewall, UPNP ( badly. I suspect a firewall issue with the NAT) routing, IRC, webserver (cherokee), tor+privoxy and host a few IRC clients and other stuff. Nothing fancy ;)
The setup:
So, on my server I then have a complete chroot for the build environment. This is a normal Gentoo image (i586 as the via cpu lacks CMOV) with -mtune=i686 for preformance. In here I have all the base/build packages+whatever I target for the installation. From here I then simply do a “ROOT=/tiny emerge <foo> “ to install. After that, using rsync -pvar from the firewall I can copy over the files as needed. Smooth sailing.
At some point I decided to try out a version control of the /tiny root. Many reasons, mainly because doing copies from the firewall to the build host, installing and upgrade, and recopying back was turning out to be a bit dangerous (operator error ahoy). Doing it with separate trees that you merge between in git was a breeze. Except that it lost suid b its. Baaad.
So, now I’ve got to decide. Do I keep doing it like this, or do I swap my installation for something simpler/different and use a prebuilt system?
And just for kicks, this is something of the update procedure:
cd /tiny
git checkout Live
ssh firewall sync-to-server
git add .; git commit -a -m "Sync from server"
git checkout master
git pull . Live
cd /
emerge --sync; emerge -vuDa world;
ROOT=/tiny emerge -up <packages>
cd /tiny
git add . ; git commit -a -m "Updated <foo>"
git checkout Cleaned
git pull . master
chroot . /usr/bin/localepurge
find usr/ -type f -iname '*.la' -delete
rm -rf usr/include usr/share/doc usr/share/man
-- insert extra steps
-- copy kernel&modules over
git add .; git commit -a -m "Cleanout phase done"
ssh firewall sync-from-server
The lost suid bits cost me a couple of hours of debugging. Bloody pain in the arse.
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