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From: vancleef@nas.nasa.gov (Robert E. Van Cleef)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: comp.unix.admin.large
Message-ID: <1990Dec18.165438.29578@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 18 Dec 90 16:54:38 GMT
References: <609@synopsys.COM>
Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov
Reply-To: vancleef@nas.nasa.gov (Robert E. Van Cleef)
Organization: NASA/Ames Research Center
Lines: 49

The way we do it is:

On your file server, you build a custom file tree for each 
architecure of workstation that you support, with different
file collections for different OS versions:

	/pub/sun4.01 - Sun OS 4.0.1
	     sun4.1  - Sun OS 4.1
             iris3   - SGI IRIS 3 series
	     iris4d  - SGI IRIS 3D series
	etc....

This file tree contains all of the directories that you want to
maintain on the file server because of size, lack of access demand,
difficulty to maintain, etc...

This is then mounted on the appropriate machine as /u/.links and
on the client you set of the needed symbolic links:

	/usr/demo 	 @-> /u/.links/demo
	/usr/games 	 @-> /u/.links/games
	/usr/man 	 @-> /u/.links/man
	/usr/local 	 @-> /u/.links/local
	/usr/unsupported @-> /u/.links/unsupported

This configuration allows us to pick and choose the parts of the system
that we hold on the file server, yet we need only one mount point for
all of them. 

Because NFS is very efficient for reads, file collections that are 
"read-only" can be widely shared. For example, /TeX only exists on 
one file server. Therefore, it must be mounted separately, with the 
correponding links being:

	mount fs01:/TeX /u/.links/tex

  For things which vary per system architecture:
	/usr/local/bin/tex @-> /u/.links/tex/sun3/bin/tex
	/usr/local/lib/tex @-> /u/.links/tex/sun3/lib

  For things that are the same across system architectures
	/usr/local/lib/tex/macros @-> /u/.links/tex/macros
	/usr/local/lib/tex/tfm @-> /u/.links/tex/tfm
	
-- 
Bob Van Cleef 			vancleef@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center	(415) 604-4366
---
Perception is reality...