On Thursday, 9 November 2006 at 8:46:00 -0600, Christopher M. Hobbs wrote: > Hello, list! > > I've got about six production servers and a couple of workstations > running FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE and 6.2-PRERELEASE. Some of these machines > are sitting in DMZ, the others are internal. Currently, each of them > has their own ports tree. > > How terrible of an idea would it be to take one of the production > servers that isn't really doing a whole lot of work, and make it's > /usr/ports available over NFS to the other machines? Am I headed in a > bad direction here?
This is what I do. It's not completely without its problems, though:
- Some programs, notably GNU autotools, get upset if you run across
NFS. I've worked around this problem by copying the tree where
necessary; it's not as bad as it seems.
- The ports collection stores build information in the work
directory. For example:
$ ls -lart work3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Nov 14 13:29 .patch_done.mythtv._usr_local
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Nov 14 13:29
.extract_done.mythtv._usr_local
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Nov 14 13:44
.configure_done.mythtv._usr_local
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Nov 14 15:56 .build_done.mythtv._usr_local
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Nov 14 15:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 grog lemis 512 Nov 14 17:14 ..
drwxr-xr-x 13 root wheel 1024 Nov 14 21:56 mythtv-0.20
If you build a package on one system, and then try on another, the
Ports Collection will find these files and assume that there is
nothing to do. You need to do a 'make clean' first to get it to do
the process again, including dependency checks, on the new machine.
> Also, what about user accounts between machines?
With NFS you typically have the same user ID on all related machines.
> I got to thinking that because some of the servers have the same
> user accounts, would it be possible to share a password file or home
> directories?
Yes, again with some caveats. The biggest ones are configuration
files in the home directory that contain references to the system
you're working on. My biggest problem is the .emacs file: it refers
to packages that I have installed on some systems only.
> Should I build another box strictly for this purpose?
I get by quite happily with a separate tree on one of my existing
systems.
Greg
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