• Slots don’t work (I’m working on a patch for the portage provider to address this issue)
• No nice way to manage /etc/conf.d/net
• Only the runlevel “default” can be managed (This is sufficient for most cases)
• No built in USE flag support (i use a binhost so this doesn’t really affect my setup). Check this site for a possible solution

The missing slots integration is especially important when it comes to Tomcat. Tomcat requires sun-jdk-1.5 and sun-jdk-1.6. I solved this by adding sun-jdk-1.5 to our install image. Apart from this problems it works very well.

Binhost setup

The easiest way to ensure that all systems run the same software (version, use flags) is to setup a portage binhost and force all clients to use this server as only package source. There are a lot of howto’s out there on creating a binhost so i won’t explain it detail. To force all clients to use only binary packages set the following statements in make.conf (Puppet distribution!):

PORTAGE_BINHOST="http://192.168.1.1/x86_64"
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--getbinpkgonly --usepkgonly"

The parameter EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS is important because Puppet will run the command “emerge xxx/yyy” so you can’t specify extra parameters. This parameter setup ensures that the package cannot be installed when the binary package is missing on the binhost.

if ( ! open( LOCK, ">/var/run/my_app.lock" ) ) {
    print "Failed to open lock file: $!\n";
    exit(1);
}
 
## Create exclusive, non blocking lock: LOCK_EX(2) + LOCK_NB(4)
if ( ! flock( LOCK, 6 ) ) {
    close( LOCK );
 
    if ( ! open( PID, "</var/run/my_app.pid" ) ) {
 
        print "Failed to read PID file: $!\n";
        exit(1);
    }
 
    my $pid = <PID>;
    close( PID );
 
    print "Failed to accquire lock. Another instance (PID $pid) running!\n";
    exit(1);
}
else {
    if ( ! open( PID, ">/var/run/my_app.pid" ) ) {
 
        print "Failed to open pid file: $!\n";
        exit(1);
    }
 
    print PID $$;
 
    if ( ! close( PID ) ) {
        print "Failed to write PID file: $!\n";
        exit(1);
    }
}

That’s it!

1. Create a Portage Overlay (refer to the official documentation) and enable it in /etc/make.conf
2. Create a new category directory within your overlay dir (mkdir /usr/local/portage/my-ebuilds)
3. Create application directory (mkdir /usr/local/portage/my-ebuilds/foobar)
4. Copy the existing ebuild to the new app directory
5. Create a files directory and put the patch there
6. Modify the ebuild to apply your patch

...
 
# This is the magic line:
PATCHES="${FILESDIR}/my_patch.patch"
 
...

After you finished these tasks you have to (re)generate the Manifest:

ebuild [OVERLAY_PATH]/my-ebuilds/foobar/foobar-1.0.0.ebuild digest

That’s it. If you have trouble feel free to contact me: daniel@linuxaddicted.de

HISTCONTROL="ignoredups"

This setting in bashrc or profile makes BASH ignore duplicate commands when searching the history. It’s pretty useful if you had entered the same command several times.