Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!sparkyfs.erg.sri.com!intrepid.erg.sri.com!davy From: davy@intrepid.erg.sri.com (David Curry) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: comp.unix.admin.large Message-ID: <1990Dec28.173354.1738@erg.sri.com> Date: 28 Dec 90 17:33:54 GMT References: <609@synopsys.COM> Sender: news@erg.sri.com Reply-To: davy@erg.sri.com Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA Lines: 45 In article , pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: |>On 18 Dec 90 02:06:56 GMT, arnold@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