Support for NFS sharing of /usr under Debian?
G'day,
When I bought a new PC recently, I looked around at which Linux distribution
to install on it, and rather quickly settled on Debian. I've been rather
impressed with it, and so thought I'd install it on my old 386 as well (I
also figured it would be easier to maintain the two systems if they were
basically running the same thing - the 386 had a mish-mash of all kinds of
things on it). I have the two PCs networked together, and so figured I
could set things up to share /usr and /home, using NFS. On the weekend I
set up a minimal Debian system on a 15 meg partition on the 386, was able to
NFS mount /usr and /home, and the binaries seemed to work, etc. Of course,
most (all?) of the configuration files do not reside on /usr, but rather in
/etc and the like. An obvious thing to do would be to just copy them from
the new machine and change the appropriate parts, but it would be nicer to
use Debian's configuration tools - and I might have to do it again every
time I upgrade a package. Another possibility would be to copy the package
control files across and fool it into thinking the packages were installed
but not configured or something (though I suspect this would need the
"clean" versions of the files to exist?).
My question is basically whether something like this has been done before,
and whether someone can give any advice on where to start if it were to be
attempted. Essentially what I would like to eventually be able to do is
install a package on one machine, but configure it independently on two (or
more), and would be prepared to do a reasonable amount of work towards this
end. I'm still not all that familiar with just how the Debian package
system works, because I'm still reasonably new to Debian, but it looks like
the package system as it stands does not really support this kind of thing
(and my profuse apologies if I'm wrong :-).
Thank you for any and all help,
Warwick
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Warwick Harvey email: warwick@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Department of Computer Science phone: +61-3-9282-2478
University of Melbourne fax: +61-3-9282-2490
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052 web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick
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