Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau
From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Directory Naming Schemes Among Many Linked Machines
Message-ID: <11255@jade.BBN.COM>
Date: 18 Jul 88 21:44:31 GMT
References: <133@ai.etl.army.mil>
Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 22

Well, the convention most people around here have adopted is to give each 
machine a /nfs directory on which remote filesystems get mounted, and then
mount things on /nfs/{machine}/{filesystem}.  

Each machine also has its *own* filesystems linked into /nfs/{ownname},
and all symbolic links point into the /nfs hierarchy for the local 
machine.  This scheme provides and unambiguous name for every point in
every filesystem on every machine, and prevents you from inadvertantly 
pointing links into the wrong filesystem.

If you don't understand how this can happen, consider what happens if you 
mount /usr from red, and it has a symbolic link to /usr/local.  If you've 
mounted /usr/local from blue, the link is valid, but what's pointed to isn't 
what the link's creator on red expected.  If the link is instead made to
point to /nfs/red/usr/local, you don't trip across this problem.

For compatibility with SunOS 4.0, you might want to use /net as the NFS
mount point instead of /nfs.  SunOS 4 by default uses /net as the mount
point for hostname-based mounts performed by the automounter.
--
 Matt Landau		    The happiest cold and lonely guy 
 mlandau@bbn.com	          stuck in the Yukon without a dog.