Re: exporting /usr NFS for small network
Richard Cobbe wrote:
>
> Lo, on Wednesday, October 24, joe golden did write:
>
> > I am getting tired of updating 7 machines. I have home directories
> > exported NFS for our network (with minimal security concerns) and this
> > seems to work fine.
> >
> > My question is how do I export usr NFS. What are the configuration
> > issues. How must disks be partitioned? Are all the X/card and monitor
> > specifics guaranteed to be all in /etc? If any of these specs are in usr
> > I'll have hashed spaghetti flying everywhere in no time.
>
> So long as the distributions in question follow the FHS (see
> http://www.pathname.com/ for details), then sharing /usr like this is
> fine. According to the FHS, /usr is for shareable, read-only data; config
> files belong in /etc. I'm pretty sure Debian qualifies here.
>
> I don't think partitioning is relevant to this situation; NFS exports files
> and directories based on the directory structure, not the physical devices.
>
> > I was looking for advice on pitfalls to avoid.
>
> The only thing I'm not sure how to do is keep /usr/local local to each
> machine, even though /usr is mounted across the network. This may or may
> not be a requirement in your situation, however.
>
I don't think you need to worry about that. From FHS 2.2, section 4.9.1:
"The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when
installing software locally.It
needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is
updated. It may be used for programs
and data that are shareable amongst a group of hosts, but not found in
/usr."
So you shouldn't need to keep /usr/local seperate on each machine. If
your particular installation required such an arrangement, you could
mount /usr from an NFS server, and then you should be able to mount
/usr/local from a local partition if required.
If a need for different /usr/local is present in your environment, you
will have a concern here. A possibility is to have your NFS server
export something like: /export/usr, /export/usr/local/flavor1, and
/export/usr/local/flavor2. Then, on your machines you would do the
following:
on machines that need to have "flavor 1" of local:
mount nfsserver:/export/usr /usr
mount nfsserver:/export/local/flavor1 /usr/local
on machines that need to have "flavor 2" of local:
mount nfsserver:/export/usr /usr
mount nfsserver:/export/local/flavor2 /usr/local
(bad example, since I believe you'd have to export
> HTH,
>
> Richard
>
-- Rich
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Rich Puhek
ETN Systems Inc.
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