re:Making debian net-aware

["brian (b.c.) white" <1634933@bnr.ca>]

>I have been thinking more about making Debian network-aware and what I 
>think is needed is a new network status flag and a few modifications to 
>dpkg and dselect to make them use this new flag. Then there should be a 
>standard place where files in /usr to be exported to other systems should 
>be put. Some choices for this "exportdir" would be /usr/export or 
>/usr/share/export, we would need to settle on one standard location. 
>Similarly, there should be an "importdir" with subdirs for each hostname.
>Then, the modifications to the packaging tools will be relatively small.
>Here is what I think would be the most useful network status flags and 
>their respective actions:

My personal vote (and what is used here at BNR fairly successfully) is
to put all the exports under /export/... with everything there being
a symlink to what you really want to export.  Everithing to be imported
goes under /mnt/...

For example, a standard set of tools under "/tools" might be done as
follows...

server:/tools/bin/...						# All of the actual tool programs
server:/export/tools -> /tools				# Make it visible under /export
client:/mnt/tools -> server:/export/tools	# Mount server tools under /mnt
client:/tools -> /mnt/tools					# Make tools appear in proper place

There are cases for doing some mounts directly (i.e. not via /mnt), but in
the general case this seems to work quite well.

                                        Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@bnr.ca )

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