Shared Packages

[Mike Hogsett]

I have about 45 Linux (Redhat 7.3) workstations that I will soon be
{upgrading to | reinstalling with} Fedora.

Currently they each mount an NFS filesystem at /pkg into which I
install updated packages (such as openoffice, gnu development
toolchain tools, mozilla, etc., etc.).  

I am planning on doing away with the NFS mounting since people will
often complain about poor performance (programs take too long to load
from /pkg, etc.).

My current plan is to rsync /pkg every night on each machine using an
rsync server.  I have two test machines setup and this is working
fairly well.  The rsync will be run via cron.  The script which will
run the rsync will sleep $[ $RANDOM / 60 ] seconds before performing
the rsync so the machines aren't hitting the rsync server all at once
at 3AM.

Does anyone have any comments on this plan, similar experiences, etc.?

In addition, in the old /pkg I would (when the package supported it)
use `--prefix=/pkg' as the argument to configure.  This was all fine
and dandy until we wanted two, or more, versions of the same package
installed.  Instead in the new /pkg I will use
`--prefix=/pkg/<pkg_name><pkg_name_version>` as an argument to
configure and create a symbolic link at /pkg/current_version which
points to the default version.  This way I can have multiple versions
of the same package installed without the new version clobbering the
old, and the man pages can be found for the package that is actually
in your $PATH.

Again, does anyone have any comments on this plan, similar
experiences, etc.?

 - Mike

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