User:Flyser/Low maintenance Gentoo

Important
This is only a draft version of this article and far from being complete yet.

This article aims to collect instructions and scripts to reduce the maintenance overhead of gentoo to a minimum.

Use Cron

This is an advice rather than actual instruction and should be a no-brainer, but I want to mention it nonetheless: Whenever you need to execute the same tasks periodically, use a cron daemon.

Depending on the type of the task and the system, you may choose a traditional cron daemon such as vixie-cron or dcron or you might prefer a cron implementation that tries to be slightly more intelligent such as anacron, which is often a good choice of non-server systems.

Use atd

atd is a daemon, which allows users to schedule commands to run at one specific time. For example:

user $at 1145 jan 29

at> cc -o foo foo.c
at> ^D #(press Control-D while at the beginning of a line)

Runs cc -o foo foo.c at 11:45 on the 29th January.

Set up a system logger

Unless you skipped this part of the gentoo installation guide, you should already have one. If you do, pause for a moment and ponder if its configuration could be improved.

Install ntpd

The ntp daemon is a convenient way to keep the clock of an unix system in sync. While you could also run ntp manually once in a while, the daemon solution is preferable as it uses the adjtime syscall to avoid large time jumps. Here is how you do it:

root #emerge net-misc/openntpd

root #mkdir -p /var/lib/openntpd/chroot

then, optionally edit /etc/ntpd.conf and run

root #rc-update add ntpd default

root #/etc/init.d/ntpd start

Note that the system time will not change immediately after starting the daemon. Be patient.

Automatic system updates

Warning
This is a very dangerous thing to do and will break your system at some point!

First create the following script and make sure it's executable:

FILE /root/autoupdate.shAutomatically updates a gentoo system

#!/bin/sh

# This script is meant to be run as a cron job to update a gentoo system automatically
set -e

# Redirect output
exec 1>>/var/log/autoupdate.log
exec 2>>/var/log/autoupdate.log

echo
echo "Starting system update on $(date)"

# Drop our priority to the lowest possible
renice -n 20 $$
ionice -c3 -p$$
chrt -i -p 0 $$

emerge --sync || return 1
layman -S || true # uncritical
eix-update &

emerge -f @world &
emerge -uDN  --keep-going --complete-graph=y --with-bdeps=y --jobs 2 @world \
  || ( emerge -ukDN portage -j2
       python-updater -- -j2 
       perl-cleaner --all 
       haskell-updater
       emerge -uDN  --keep-going --complete-graph=y --with-bdeps=y --jobs 2 @system
       emerge -uDN  --keep-going --complete-graph=y --with-bdeps=y --jobs 2 @world
  ) || true
emerge -c
emerge -1 --keep-going --jobs 2 @preserved-rebuild || true
revdep-rebuild -i -- --jobs 2 --keep-going || true
prelink -amR || true
env-update && source /etc/profile

then add it to your crontab, e.g. like so

FILE crontab entry to run the automatic update every day at 03:00 in the night

0     3      *      *      *      /root/autoupdate.sh

ToDo

Send mail to inform about etc-update, elog, ...

Automatic installation of security fixes

glsa-check