Hello. I am the system administrator (read "graduate student
who knew a little unix") for 5 DEC alphas (4 3000 model 600 and 1
500/500). I am currently in the process of upgrading the 3000 model
600's from OSF1 version 2.0 to digital unix 4.0b. SInce all 5 alpha's
will now be running the same OS, it makes a lot of sense to mount as
much common stuff on NFS as possible, I think.
I've already decided to mount /usr/local via NFS. The tricky
part is /usr. From looking at the way things are divided between /
and /usr on the default installation, it looks like /usr should be
pretty easy to mount remotely. I've already realized that /usr/var
is a little tricky. I've decided to keep var local on each machine
(since /usr/var is already a link from /var, I just link it to
something local). Everything looked like it would work.
However, as a trial, I booted with the local /usr, shutdown to
single user mode, mounted a remote /usr and tried "/sbin/init 3"
which works fine until it gets to "/usr/sbin/siainit" which it claims
it cannot execute.
/usr is exported read-only and with the default mapping of
root to uid -2. Is that the problem? It's imported with the suid
option (which seems necessary for things like sendmail in /usr/sbin).
Anyway, as you can tell, I'm a beginner at much of this. Is
mounting "/usr" remotely just a bad idea? If so, which parts of /usr
can be mounted remotely? The old alphas don't have enough space on
the default /usr partition for everything we need there so mounting it
seemed natural. It also seemed like it would save on upgrading time
for things like compilers.
Any advice or pointers to information would be most
appreciated.
-Adam
____________________________________________________________
Adam Lupu-Sax <lupu-sax_at_typhoon.harvard.edu>
http://monsoon.harvard.edu/~lupu-sax
PGP public key:
http://monsoon.harvard.edu/~lupu-sax/key.asc
Received on Sat Jan 17 1998 - 21:17:29 NZDT