I received two more responses to my query about the quality of AMD and how it compared to DEC's
automounter. Hope they are useful to the group -- they were for me.
Thanks to:
Peter Marquardt <wwwutz_at_MPIMG-Berlin-Dahlem.MPG.DE>
Gerald McLarnon <mclarnon_at_atm.ox.ac.uk>
Scott Taylor
smt_at_gamma.physics.uiowa.edu
__________________________________________________________________________
We're running a whole cluster of about 50 Digital Unix, 5 Solaris, 10 Linux,
10 NetBSD with amd. Due to its flexibility we're able to supply all
systems with the same pathes like "/home", "/project",/"package". Even CD-Rom
mounting on Destop-Alphas with different formats is no problem anymore.
(Just drop in the CD and read from /cdrom/rre or /cdrom/ufs etc.).
Even when a /project-subtree gets filled up, it's no problem to move it's
contents on another machine with more space and finally change the
NIS-distributed map. We also mirror databases via amd to prevent exhausting
nfs-traffic (a nightly rdist keeps them up to date, where this is possible).
Since we are running amd the amount of "stale-nfs"-errors went down to approx.
3% as we had before (either fstab-hardmounted nfs or automount-mounts).
I won't run any unix-cluster with more than one machine without it anymore.
The only probolem you might have is to get
a) a "first" "simple" running map.
b) used to the weird pathes "pwd" returns and prevent programs to use them.
/home/foouser gets decoded to the hard-path /amd/hostname/home/foouser
which is kind of comparable to /tmp_mnt/home/foouser which onbly exists
for the time of the nfs mount.
c) find a way to distribute maps if you're not using NIS.
Yours,
Peter
__________________________________________________________________________
FYI I am also using amd on Digital UNIX 4.0D (been using on 30 systems
since 3.2G). I find the mapping language really useful and it means I can
share the automount maps between my linux systems, digital unix and sun
systems. The problem you will have with it is that the amd only
understands nfs v2, not the nfs v3 that the solaris/digital unix systems
can understand. In other words you get flexability at the cost of
performance. I think there might be some creative things you can do with
putting explicit "mount" commands in the amd config but I haven't done it
yet.
For this reason I have recently been looking at moving my digital unix
boxes to the digital automount but like many projects it is currently work
in progress.
HTH,
- Gerald
Received on Mon Aug 10 1998 - 14:59:34 NZST