>>>>> I see what you desire now - essentially you want to clone your laptop >>>>> (or big chunks of it) over to your other workstations.
I've been working on this and I think I have a good and simple plan. My laptop roams around with me and is the "master" system. The office router is the "submaster" system. All of the other office systems are "minion" systems. All of the systems are 100% hardware-identical laptops. All of the minions are 100% software-identical. I install every package that any system needs on the master and create an SSH keypair. The only config files that change from their state on the master are: /etc/conf.d/hostname, /etc/conf.d/net, /etc/ssh/sshd_config, /etc/shorewall/*. I write comments in those files which serve as flags for scripted changes. I write a script that is run from the master to the submaster, or from the submaster to a minion. If it's the former, rsync / is run with exceptions (/usr/portage, /usr/local/portage, /var/log, /tmp, /home, /root but /root/.ssh/id_rsa_script* is included), my personal user is removed, a series of workstation users are created with useradd -m, services are added or removed from /etc/runlevels/default, and config files are changed according to comment flags. If it's the latter, rsync / is run without exceptions, services are added or removed from /etc/runlevels/default, and config files are changed according to comment flags. All user info on the submaster and minions would be effectively reset whenever the script is run and that's fine. Root logins would have to be allowed on the submaster and minions but only with the SSH key. There are probably more paths to exclude when rsyncing master to submaster. That's it. No matter how numerous the minions become, this should allow me to keep everything running by administrating only my own system, pushing that to the submaster, and having the submaster push to the minions. I've been going over the nitty-gritty and everything looks good. What do you think? Is there anything inherently wrong with rsyncing / onto a running system? If there are little or no changes to make, about how much data would actually be transferred? Is there a better tool for this than rsync? I know Funtoo uses git for syncing with their portage tree. - Grant
