On 17 Feb 2001 11:40:03 -0600, Philip C Mendelsohn wrote: > Hi, > > I've got a practical question for you network admin types. > > I can serve and mount NFS things all day long, but have a question about > using this power for good instead of evil. > > If I have say 6 computers, and would like to have one central /usr, does > this create problems when one set of software is run on one computer but > not another? > > I.E., I have one respectable machine that does all the big memory > intensive / number crunching things and some 486 / Pentium machines that > are fine for outlying nodes. Rather than have netscape or mozilla hogging > drive space on each machine, I could serve /usr. The hesitation is (this > is a Debian network) if I install a package from one machine, what happens > to the config files, since each machine (presumably) has its own /etc, > /var, ... > > Or, do you share the drive, install from each machine, then /usr collects > everything from everyone, and it doesn't matter if you overwrite something > with the same thing. (I *shudder* at the kludgy nature of this!) > > Any tips on sharing /usr, /home, and integrating with NIS would be > appreciated. I haven't found TFM to R yet. <g> > First of all, lets hope this works because this is my first message from evolution. We'll see if it works or not. As for sharing nfs filesystems for applications, that's a perfect idea. But here are a few suggestions: - Don't use /usr on the client systems. Use something like /usr/local or /opt/local or /apps. This will keep local packages seperate from NFS-mounted applications. - On the NFS server you can export /usr, but I'd suggest exporting /usr/local instead. Then install any applications you want to share in /usr/local. (or whatever you export) But this will make it harder to use packages (rpm, deb) because they all want to go in /usr. If you really want to use packages, you should use /usr on the server, and then mount it as /usr/local on the client. - Make the exported directories READ-ONLY. This will save you a lot of grief. There is no need to the application directories to be R/W. (but of course /home will need to be R/W.) - Make your beefier machine the client. NFS fileserving isn't that intensive, so I'd put the power with the application. (But then you have disk-I/O to consider...) Hope this helps. Clay