Re: deprecating /usr as a standalone filesystem?
On Tue, 5 May 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
Yes, the most repeated argument has been mount /usr via NFS.
Unfortunately, nobody yet explained how do they update the resulting
cluster of machines.
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. If you don't want
to take downtime, you have two chroots on the NFS server and pivot
systems back and forth between the two chroots as you do updates.
I have parts of /usr and /var shared via NFS and use cfengine to
push/pull related updates to /etc and other non-shared locations.
cfengine will keep the non-shared portions synchronized, and restart
services when their config files are updated.
People did and still do this all the time with AFS. It's pretty
well-established how to make it work.
'Tis a little harder now with my servers being split betwixt i686 and
amd64 machines (db format differs, so I had to use inn peering, not
shared spool, etc).
I personally don't care any more because hard drives have gotten a lot
bigger, but it's technically quite feasible.
Yes, but I see this as an management of space/time/etc trade-off.
For me the big items for standalone /usr are mentioned elsewhere -
I tend to have a separate /boot and put everthing else in a (encrypted
for laptops) LVM where resizing/moving/backup/security/etc all argure
for independant partitions.
I see as quite pointless to use "let's export /usr via NFS" as an
argument, if Debian does not provide a way to make that setup tenable.
Certainly looks tenable right now to me.
Indeed, tenable - and working
--
Rick Nelson
<miguel> `You have been unsubscribed from the high energy personal
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<miguel> I dont remember getting into the mailing list
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