Re: deprecating /usr as a standalone filesystem? [/usr on NFS]
Frank Lin PIAT <fpiat@klabs.be> writes:
> On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 16:25 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> It's not particularly difficult. You update the system master and
>> push that update into NFS, synchronizing any non-/usr data as you
>> need to across all the systems mounting that NFS partition.
> I have always been skeptical about sharing /usr on Debian, especially
> I've always wondered is how you upgrade the remote (nfs-mounted)
> systems?
> * How to upgrade /bin, /lib... files?
> * Can dpkg be told to not touch /usr on those machines?
> * Some (pre|post)(inst|rm) scripts use files in /usr... Aren't they
> guaranteed to behave in unpredictable way, if the version is /usr
> aren't the one expected by those scripts?
I think it would be fairly difficult without using a golden image
approach, where there's one system (or chroot on an NFS server) that you
upgrade and then push the non-/usr results to all the systems mounting
/usr. Doing that is fairly straightforward, though.
Don't get me wrong: I don't do this, nor do I have any plans to do
this. Disk is too cheap to bother and there are better ways of keeping
systems in sync these days, IMO. But it's a very long-standing sysadmin
technique, I wouldn't be surprised if some people still use it, and it's
certainly technically doable.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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