[sabayon] Questions about using sabayon in a large linux deployment

[Jakub Krajcovic <Jakub Krajcovic al com au>]

Hello sabayon developers and users,

We're currently in the process of figuring out linux deployment to potentially hundreds of users, and are currently in the testing phase with tens of users. One of the important things that we've come across is the management and deployment of unified user profiles, and this is where sabayon fits perfectly. We were very psyched to find this tool, and are currently trying to figure out all of the intricacies of how it is working. We're read the documentation, and have a basic deployment model ready, but we've encountered some questions along the way that i am hoping to get answers to.

So, without further ado, here goes:

1. Why exactly is sabayon storing a copy of the profile in its local cache in ~/.sabayon? What is the relationship between this cached profile that resides in the home directory of the user, and the central profile that resides on our http server? And the last part of this question -- how does sabayon know that the central profile is updated and that it should apply a new profile? (let's say our central profile is http://profiles/default.zip, and in a months time, we overwrite the file with a newer version but the same name, the question will then be -- will sabayon recognize this and apply the new profile?
2. We have found that the zip file created by sabayon is very large - 47MB to be precise. The funny thing is, that when i manually unzip the file, and check how much space the files it contains are actually using is 8.3MB. We have a hunch that there is something broken with way sabayon zips up the files into the zipfile, because when i manually try to unzip the profile file, it is asking me if i wish to overwrite a LOT of files. Example:

unzip ./al-gnome-default.zip
<OUTPUT OMITTED>
 extracting: .gnome2/backgrounds.xml  
 extracting: .bash_history           
replace .gnome2/accels/gnome-session-properties? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
 extracting: .gnome2/accels/gnome-session-properties  
replace .gnome2/accels/gedit? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
 extracting: .gnome2/accels/gedit    
 extracting: .gnome2/share/fonts/fonts.dir  
 extracting: .gnome2/share/cursor-fonts/fonts.dir  
replace .gnome2/share/cursor-fonts/fonts.dir? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
 extracting: .gnome2/share/cursor-fonts/fonts.dir  
replace .gnome2/share/fonts/fonts.dir? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
 extracting: .gnome2/share/fonts/fonts.dir  
replace .gnome2/accels/gnome-session-properties? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
 extracting: .gnome2/accels/gnome-session-properties  
replace .gnome2/accels/gedit? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: y
<OUTPUT OMITTED>

etc, and if i were to just press "y" instead of "A", i think it will ask over 50 times if i wish to overwrite something.

Can you please comment on this? Why is it that the zipfile created by sabayon is so large, when in fact the size of its contents is almost 6 times smaller?

3. Can you please elaborate on the actions that sabayon-apply actually does once i log? Does it execute anything, or does just unzip the profile zipfile into my homedir? or anything else?

thank you very much for your time and answers

best regards
jakub


--
Jakub Krajcovic
Systems Engineer
Animal Logic

p: +61 2 938 34109
e: jakub krajcovic al com au