Subject: Feature request "vserver --all / --mark xyz"
From: Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:39:12 +0100

  Can I make a feature request that would greatly enhance managing my 
vserver setup:

I would find it extremely useful if the vserver commands took a 
consistent group/mark/something_else parameter which allowed me to 
quickly run commands on a group of servers, (ideally overlapping groups 
would be possible)

I see that this is already possible for the purposes of 
starting/stopping servers, although not I think through the "vserver" 
wrapper script directly?

My use case would be something like the following:

vserver -m test_servers start
vserver -m mail_svrs exec "some management commands"

vupdate_world -m live_servers -- -vk
vupdate_world -m 32bit_servers -- -vk
vemerge -m www some_package
(I often don't want to update all servers, just some subset)

I currently have some scripts I hack up to assist with this kind of 
thing.  I investigated trying to modify the vserver scripts, but I found 
it reasonably tricky to understand the inheritance structure of the 
scripts and actually how the iteration is done at present?

Grateful if you would consider such a feature request (or enlighten me 
if I should really be using some different process..?)


Incidently things tend to get messy when I want to do something a bit 
more involved across all my gentoo servers, eg updating openssl libs 
(involves rebuilding packages, removing old SSL libs, checking for 
breakage, etc).  Perhaps other folks already have good success solving 
these problems using other tools?  Care to share?

Thanks to everyone involved in creating the excellent linux-vserver

Ed W