Re: managing multiple machines
On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 02:15:11PM -0800, David Wright wrote:
| On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Kelley, Tim (CBS-New Orleans) wrote:
|
| > I would say if you're gonna go ahead and share /usr you may as well go
| > diskless.
You can specify a directory on the server to serve as the root for the
client(s). You don't have to (and shouldn't) make the server's root
the client's root. If each client is identical, you can have a single
directory on the server that will store the clients' configuration.
| > However what is the problem you're having with the machines having their
| > own /usr? Can't you just have a "standard" group of packages that each
| > machine gets, then update every night from there?
|
| This is fine until the standard changes; then I have to go into each
| machine and adjust it. This is bad enough if everythingh is a debian
| package, but suppose I use -MCPAN to get a perl package. Or compile
| something locally? (Actually this isn't so bad -- I already share
| /usr/local.) And if I get a new machine, how do I know I have reproduced
| the software on the others EXACTLY? It's a nightmare.
Maybe you should check out one of the case studies on the Aegis site.
Aegis is a CVS-like system, but at a higher level. They use it to
manage their DHCP (and other?) configuration for a large system with
many admins.
If you had a system that would allow you to update the package list,
etc, on one machine and then push that change out to the config files
of all the clients, then make the clients update this would work. If
you go diskless, then simply rereading the "disk" will provide all the
updates.
| > Mounting just /usr over nfs is going to have non trivial reprocussions
| > with dpkg I would think. That is usually what /opt is for and probably
| > why debian does not use it.
|
| I don't understand this, but I certainly want to! Why would dpkg care or
| even know if the directory it is writing to is shared out over NFS?
If you mount _only_ /usr, you will get most of the stuff that dpkg
installs. However, you won't get the dpkg config data in /var and any
other package's data that is in /var (eg /var/lib). Then you have a
/var and /usr that are out of sync.
-D
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