comp.unix.admin.large

[David Curry]

In article <PCG.90Dec27191000 at teachk.cs.aber.ac.uk>, pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk
(Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
|>On 18 Dec 90 02:06:56 GMT, arnold at mango.synopsys.com (Arnold de Leon) said:
|>
|>arnold>         o automount /usr/local
|>
|>Surely you jest... You always want it mounted :-).
|>

Feh.  We automount /usr/local on all our workstations.  Works like a charm.
It's not so inefficient... one symbolic link, and that's what a namei cache
is all about anyway.

Our organization is as follows:  we have four Sun 4/390 heterogeneous servers.
Each one has /usr/local (sun4) and /usr/local.sun3 (sun3) exported to all our
systems.  Dataless workstations (which have their own /usr) have a symbolic
link to /net/usr.local3-4.x or /net/usr.local4-4.x as appropriate for their
architecture (sun3 or sun4) and operating system (SunOS 4.x).  There's also
a /net/usr.local3-3.x for the half a dozen SunOS 3.5 clients, but that's
another story.  Diskless clients just have a symlink in /export/exec/sun3
pointing at /net/usr.local3-4.x.

Automounting /usr/local is actually pretty useful - when a server goes down,
the systems mounting /usr/local will just get it from somewhere else.  There
is one problem for people like me who run X (from /usr/local) and leave it
up all the time, since the NFS unmount will fail, but even so, if I'm desperate
I just reboot and pick up /usr/local from some other server.

As far as organization within /usr/local goes, we just have /usr/local/bin,
/usr/local/etc, /usr/local/lib, and /usr/local/include.  For a few packages,
we do stuff like /usr/local/bin/mh and /usr/local/bin/X.V11R4.  Manual pages
go in /usr/man/manl (that's what it's for, folks - why bother with
/usr/local/man?).

Source tree is /usr/src/local/whatever, and we use dirlink (a program to make
symbolic link trees) to build programs for the different architectures.  We
do not maintain the objects on-line, since we can regenerate them.

Why complicate matters?  I saw the paper presented at LISA.  Sure, it's an
interesting idea, and I don't want to disparage others' work.  But the whole
time I was listening, the thought kept running through my mind:  "Why on
earth would you ever want to confuse your life like this?"

Dave Curry
SRI International