I'm also a fan of Gentoo, but realistically, if they were running Debian or Red Hat or a derivative, they would be able to use the recommended releases directly

I'm also a fan of Gentoo, but realistically, if they were running Debian or Red Hat or a derivative, they would be able to use the recommended releases directly from Ceph: http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/install/get-packages/ http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/install/get-packages/ My interpretation of the writeup suggests that most of their problems would have been avoided by running the latest supported release of Ceph, on a supported distribution. I ran Gentoo servers myself for a few years, but I had to give it up when I realized I wasn't getting much benefit for all the extra effort I was putting in. It was a great way to learn how free software packages interact with each other, but it became a fairly significant time sink to rebuild the world every so often.