On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 10:36:12PM -0400, Quartz wrote: > >Does your embedded storage run NOR/NAND or something like SDHC Memory > >Cards? > > > >If your systems are running SDHC you can easily create clones with a > >laptop& the DD utility. > > A couple of them do, but it doesn't matter in this case. The main issue with > compiling is that it can effectively knock the system offline for hours > which isn't acceptable. Any process that involves shutting the machine off > or booting into a separate OS image has the same problem. > > It's just a question of minimizing downtime.
You build a release of -stable on one single platform, such as a workstation, and then deploy it as a binary update to your production servers. Build time is then separate from production maintenance windows. My flight of -stable servers share the same architecture, and I have a single build machine. These servers are in redundant configurations using carp(4) so I am able to perform maintenance without any operational downtime. I'll repeat -- without any operational downtime. But I have the luxury of deploying redundant systems with carp(4). The maintenance windows do take about 10 minutes of wall time, because these machines are all "embedded" sized -- Alix systems -- and the slowest part of the update is untarring filesets onto their compact flash storage devices. If they had magnetic drives or SSDs the windows would be less than 5 minutes.
