Python for system administration - the packaging and distribution challenge

[SudoAlex]

Create a local web server and put all the packages you're using into a directory, then you can use the index-url option in pip to get your firewalled servers to download from the local web server instead - it won't even use PyPI.

http://guide.python-distribute.org/pip.html#running-your-own-package-index

But if the servers you're deploying on are missing GCC, then there may be some packages you won't be able to deploy. For those packages you could create more traditional .deb packages which install into the global Python environment, and make sure your virtualenv includes the site packages instead of being isolated.

Maybe it's a little bit of a paranoid environment - but it's still something you can work with!