[Beowulf] /usr/local over NFS is okay, Joe

[Tony Travis]

Tim Cutts wrote:
> 
> On 4 Jul 2008, at 12:44 pm, Tony Travis wrote:
> 
>> One thing that I value from my BSD/SunOS/Solaris days is /export, 
>> which is where ALL shared (exported) filesystems should be placed on 
>> NFS servers. I'm a real supporter of Debian/Ubuntu, but it drives me 
>> bonkers that Debian policy is to put home directories in /home. I put 
>> them in:
>>
>>     /export/home
> 
> If you want a Debian system to do that, just:
> 
> sed -i -e 's:^DHOME=/home:DHOME=/export/home:' /etc/adduser.conf
> 
> Job done.  All users created after that will be in /export/home

Hello, Tim.

Thanks for the jungle tip, which I already know about... My point was 
that if you want peer2peer sharing of home directories in the timeless 
tradition of 4.xBSD and SunOS/Solaris, you need to do more than just 
decide that home directories should go in /export/home instead of /home.

The convention I adopt is that *anything* exported via NFS goes in:

	/export

However, this is not specified in the LFH (although "/export/usr" does 
appear in an example:

	http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/

The reason I'm posting this is to remind everyone that Sun worked out 
some good strategies for doing this sort of thing already and it's not a 
bad idea to put what you export/share via NFS into /export.

>> Naturally, I don't always practice what I preach and recently I've 
>> been trying to work out to use the automounter the 'Debian' way ;-)
> 
> There is no automounter "Debian way", at least not in my view, and I 
> maintain one of the automounter packages for them.  :-)  You're free to 
> do whatever you like.  am-utils does have an example configuration it 
> can set up, but the package does not assume you're using it that way, 
> and makes no demands on what you have automounted and where.  I have two 
> automount intercept points on my machines; /nfs for home directories and 
> general data directories, and /software for the sort of common software 
> that we've been discussing here.

Yes, of course, we are free to put anything anywhere we want in Linux, 
but if you want other people to understand your conventions without long 
explanations then BSD/Sun have already set a pretty good example of how 
to go about it using /export and mount points like /home in automount 
maps. I'm just a little surprised that the LFH doesn't mention it :-)

	Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis,                     |  mailto:ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk
Rowett Research Institute,          |    http://www.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt
Greenburn Road, Bucksburn,          |   phone:+44 (0)1224 712751
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