I’ve been using Gentoo for many years now and although hardware has failed me several times, with anything from the motherboard to the hard drives going bad, I have managed to keep the same software and transplant it on new hardware with minimal effort each time. Some of my Gentoo servers have been updating and evolving via the portage system for nearly a decade.

Of course you should have on your system a few packages that are useful for system maintainance:

  • sys-apps/portage – most likely you have this already, as it provides emerge, emaint, elog, etc.
  • app-admin/perl-cleaner – provides perl-cleaner
  • app-admin/python-updater – provides python-updater
  • app-portage/gentoolkit – provides eclean, equery, revdep_rebuild

Apart from the typical portage syncing and emerging of updates, every once in a while (usually once per quarter), I run the following on my servers to keep things tidy:

perl-cleaner --reallyall
python-updater

emaint --check all

emaint --fix all

emerge --update --newuse --deep --with-bdeps=y @world

emerge --depclean

revdep-rebuild

eclean distfiles

There are plenty of cool tips on maintaining a Gentoo system on the references below.

MySQL/

mysql_upgrade -u root -p

mysql_upgrade invokes:

mysqlcheck -u root -p –all-databases


References

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