jeff@henson.cc.wwu.edu (Jeff Wandling) (04/13/91)
Systems: DecStation 5500 (server) & DS 5000/200's (clients) Ultrix 4.1 (all) We have our news (nntp, nn, rn, etc..) on our server "henson". We also have several other machines, all clients of henson where *all* user files are remotely mounted from henson to all the clients via NFS. Henson is where the files actually "live". On clients, like "beaker", "rowlf", "fozzie", or "gonzo", the user sees: % mount /dev/rz0a on / type ufs /dev/rz0g on /usr type ufs [... misc user file trees ...] henson:/usr/local on /usr/local type nfs (ro,hard,bg) henson:/usr/spool/mail on /usr/spool/mail type nfs (rw,hard,bg) % In order to remotely mount the news (binaries and data) on the clients, would it be wise to just mount the entire "/usr" tree, OR mount each of the directories used by news, (/usr/lib/news, /usr/local/lib/nn, /usr/spool/news, etc...) remotely from henson to each of the clients via NFS. What are the more popular (and wiseer) strategies to do this? We have other programs line TeX, magic, etc.., that will need to be mounted. The more software subsets I see that I have to mount, the more I think `just mount the whole "/usr" subtree and not mess with "each little directory"' Is that strategy not taking full advantage of NFS? Is there some feature of NFS that I don't recognize that would make this decision easier? or make the process seem clearer? Any replies would be appreciated. -- Jeff Wandling jeff@henson.cc.wwu.edu
fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) (04/17/91)
jeff@henson.cc.wwu.edu (Jeff Wandling) writes: > In order to remotely mount the news (binaries and data) on the clients, > would it be wise to just mount the entire "/usr" tree, OR mount each of the > directories used by news, (/usr/lib/news, /usr/local/lib/nn, /usr/spool/news, > etc...) remotely from henson to each of the clients via NFS. Here, we've played with the news config so everything's under the /news hierarchy on the server. /news/spool = /usr/spool/news /news/lib = /usr/lib/news /news/newsbin = /usr/lib/newsbin /news/nn/spool = /usr/spool/nn /news/nn/lib = /usr/local/lib/nn etc. The clients all mount /news as /remote/news. (They used to mount it as /news, but then we found out what pwd does when the server is down....). They install their newsreaders in their local /usr/local/bin directories just because it's so nice to have the executables local. Things like inews are in the /news hierarchy and the newsreaders point to them. It's possible to have different inewses for different architectures, but we haven't had a need for it yet. If we were running BSD systems here, we might have gone with the standard directory structure and symlinks. But SysV.3 no have symlinks, and that's what we've got. This setup does work pretty well for us. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz