Greetings.
RPM and NFS are both great tools for simplifying network administration, but
I see an apparent conflict and I'm not sure what the "standard" approach is.
Suppose I want to install an rpm package for use on the network. A simple
"rpm -ivh 'packagename'" on the NFS server isn't such a good idea, as the
package will be stored within the server's main file system, which might not
be (isn't) the same filesystem which is exported for use by the clients.
Okay, so I create (say) /export/usr, and store my binaries there. Trouble
with that is that rpm doesn't just write binaries, it also writes config
files, library files, and initial versions of variable data.
Okay, so I create (say) /export, and install an entire Linux system there,
including /export/var, /export/lib, /export/usr/lib, /export/etc, and all the
rest of the files that would be necessary to run a full-blast Linux system.
Trouble now is that some files do actually need to be local to the machine
where the software will run, for example state information that might be
written to /var.
I'm also a bit confused about how to get a given package to look in the right
place for its config files. If the package was configured to get config info
from /etc/foo.conf, there's no systematic, generalized way to tell a class of
packages "prepend $PATH to all config files, thus /etc/foo.conf becomes
$PATH/etc/foo.conf". Even the --root directive to rpm -i doesn't take care
of this if the path as written on the server differs from the path as read by
the client -- which it almost always does in my experience.
Was RPM just not designed with NFS-heavy networks in mind? Or am I missing
something basic? At this point it seems as though I'm going to be stuck
visiting (or automating the visitation of) every machine on my network, and
running an rpm command on each one every time we want to change our software
package loadout.
I'm hoping that somebody who does this can suggest some tricks.
Thanks,
-m
--
Michael Jinks, IB
Systems Administrator, Saecos Corporation
HOORAY FOR POKEY!!! http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/
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