Subject: Re: [vserver] Feature request "vserver --all / --mark xyz"
From: "Daniel Hokka Zakrisson" <daniel@hozac.com>
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 21:11:38 +0200 (CEST)

Ed W wrote:
>   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)

vsomething is the command you want. At the moment it doesn't take a
mark, but --all/--running/--stopped/--marked/--unmarked.

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

Nope, start-vservers supports that though.

> 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..?)

Well, adding mark support to vsomething should be fairly trivial.
Something like
vsomething vserver -- --mark <x> -- exec ...

> 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

-- 
Daniel Hokka Zakrisson