Re: shared NFS systems

[Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com>]

Brian May <bam@debian.org> writes:

> file system unions (as mentioned by Matt) might(?) help here.

I've used the (broken) unionfs under FreeBSD, but I haven't
tried the Linux equivalent.  If I were doing this again, I'd
probably try that.

> Ideally a proper solution would eliminate the need to manual
> audit the packages, too.

Oh, I agree whole-heartedly.  Perl was the fine line between
success and insanity.

> I imagine you would have to audit the packages every upgrade.

Well, we sort of let that slide.  Yes, we should have.  No, we
haven't.  We were using the operating theory that if a package
was confined to /usr at one point, then it probably would not
migrate later.  I know that's flawed logic, but it seems to be
holding up.

> To get this right: did you have to manually install a package
> on every computer if it contained any files under /etc or
> /var?

That is correct, although all clients were built from a disk
image which eliminated much aggravation.  To be explicit, all
packages that were installed on the server which had files
outside of /usr were also installed on the clients.

One nifty hack that one of our users came up with was mounting a
small partition as /usr/local .  It seemed obvious after he did
it, but didn't occur to us during the initial building process.
-- 
Kirk Strauser