Gentoo is great! The Rackspace Cloud is great!

But, the initial state of a new Gentoo image in the Rackspace Cloud is crusty - there is no portage tree, and the installed package base is quite old. To bring it current requires several hours of intervention.

This script automates the process. Now I can issue:

wget https://github.com/erikmack/provision-rsc/raw/master/provision-rsc && chmod +x provision-rsc && ./provision-rsc

... and after some emerging I'll have a current system.

Because the script is implemented as a makefile, it can be resumed if interrupted (due to error, or user termination) without repeating unnecessary preceding steps.

Also, it becomes easy to add targets which extend or modify the default behavior.

For example, one goal is to be able to set up not only a seed server which syncs from the Gentoo repositories (the current behavior), but also downstream servers that sync from the seed.

Or, to customize your server with specific applications, you can add targets that test for the binary and emerge the package if the binary isn't found.

I hope you find the script helpful. Contact me with questions through the Github project page.