[comp.windows.open-look] calendar manager database

cmc@ecrc.de (Chris Crampton) (05/23/91)

I have a quick question about the calendar manager:
why are the database files for the CM in /var/spool?  Why not
in each user's home directory?  I suppose that this could be
to avoid  a permissions problem as some users protect their
HOME against reading.

Our problem is that we have about 80 diskless clients and so we have about
80 different /var/spool/calendar directories and backing these up does
not fit in very well with our current back-up strategy.  Am I missing the
point or would it be okay to replace all /var/spool/calendar directories
with a symlink to, say, /home/server/calendar which is a globally visible
NFS'ed directory that IS backed up?  i.e. for all clients:


	# mv /var/spool/calendar/* /home/server/calendar
	# rmdir /var/spool/calendar
	# ln -s /home/server/calendar /var/spool/calendar

Or would it be okay to add something like the following to each client's
fstab:

server:/home/server/calendar  /var/spool/calendar  nfs bg,rw,intr 0 0


Thanks for any help,

Chris.



--------------------------------------------------------------------

Chris Crampton.			uucp:  cmc@ecrc.uucp
				       ..!unido!ecrc!cmc
ECRC GmbH		    Internet:  cmc@ecrc.de
Arabellastrasse 17
D-8000 Munich 81
Germany				Tel.:  +49 89 92699  138

bigmac@erg.sri.com (Bryan McDonald) (05/25/91)

Word of warning...I am already trying this on our network,
and am beginning to see some problems with appointment
loss.  I haven't found all the problems and m just
beginning to work on it with Sun, but if you want to
rely on cm, you might hold off for a while.

What we are seeing is that when one person is using cm
from one machine, there doesn't appear to be a problem, but
when you get one person using it from two different machines,
or two people working on the same calendar, appointments
strart to disappear, mostly newly created ones.  I am 
beginning to suspect that I am seeing a problem with
the cm program pushing the daemon into flushing it's
buffers late at night, or after some idle time,
or something similar, but this is nothing
more then speculation at this point.

By the way, I am doing this on ~130 Suns, running 4.1 or
4.1.1, Sun3 to Sun4.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan McDonald        |   Computer, Hardware, And Operations Support
bigmac@erg.sri.com    |                     CHAOS
                      |            ITAD - SRI International

"I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person."