Lars Weiler

The title sounds like I do it monthly… No! But it's the second time for me that I move Gentoo's CVS to a new server. I already did it in September 2003 when we moved from our former CVS-box (funny, I even can't remember its name) to our current CVS-server, named “lark”. At that time it was a pretty easy task, as we didn't had so many developers, a quite small CVS-tree and not so many scripts for automatic actions.

Nowadays lark provides beside the CVS for the portage-tree a couple of repositories for other subprojects and SubVersion for some more subprojects. We also have some scripts for backup, hooks for mailing the CIA-statistics or the changes of the English documentation for the translators.

Setting up a new server is a good time to review the scripts and make some things a little bit different. It's good that we have the new server, called “stork” for two months already. So I had enough time to set up the backup differently than before. As we use LVM2 for our cvsroot- and svnroot-storage, I can quickly create an lvm-snapshot of the current tree and create a backup from that snapshot. The old scripts did a live-backup and sometimes it happened that somebody commited something during that time, so that the backup was not that clean… The creation of the backup takes about 30 minutes (mostly it's bzip2 which takes so long). And transfering the backup to our backup-server takes about the same time.

robbat2 worked a lot on the ssh-key-transfer. Before we copied the authorized_keys from our dev-box to lark on a hourly basis. Now we use LDAP (finally) to extract the ssh-pubkey, which takes only two seconds (woot!). So we switched to a sync every 15 minutes, which will make devs more happy!

At 7UTC on Friday we will take down lark and do an rsync of the tree to stork. A test a couple of days ago was done within three minutes. Both servers will be on the same state then. Let's hope, that the DNS-update will also be fast. We have an estimated timeframe of two hours for the move, but I guess, we will be ready sooner.

Some words about the machines:

lark

• active since September 2003 (that makes 3