using ports/packages to distribute software to a cluster

by Soren Dayto » Fri, 20 Aug 1999 04:00:00

Hi,

I'm interested in using the ports/packages mechanism to distribute
software to a cluster of machines including dialup machines.

I'm imagining a system by which one machine exports (by at least
anonymous ftp. NFS is not acceptable because of dialup authentication
and performance issues) its /usr/ports (and /usr/ports/packages)
directory and machines pull over the packages (or some subset of the
packages) installed in /usr/ports/packages/Latest.

machines would probably compare the /usr/ports/packages/Latest contents
against /var/db/pkg contents and (basically) if
/usr/ports/packages/Latest/pkg is newer than /var/db/pkg/pkg, then
install it. But if someone has implemented something, i'm not wedded to
this.

Has anyone done this or has anyone thought about this? If so, what are
your thoughts/code?

Thanks
Soren Dayton

Top

1. Using packages in a distributed environment?

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone could give me some clues as to how they're
handling the distribution of packages in /opt in a distribute filesystem
environment. It's not entirely clear to me what the best way to share
software that wants to go in /opt is...

Currently I'm installing packages in /opt on one of two machines with
a large /opt partition. The rest of my SunOS 5.x machines mount these
partitions. I go in and make links in their /opt partitions to the
newly installed software in the server partitions.

This is problematic for (at least) two reasons:
1. Maintaining the links is a pain in the butt.
2. Even though the software appears to live in /opt like a locally-installed
package, the other package related files don't get updated
(/var/sadm/pkg and stuff). Thus, other software that looks at the
package admin files to see if a package is available don't see the
software that really is in /opt.

We'd like to be able to install software in the package format, but
drop it in /usr/local/opt or something, perhaps make /opt on the clients
a link to it, and have everything work (including patches).

Is it a problem that the package maintenance files aren't updated in this
scheme? Is it a bad idea to have *none* of /opt local? It seems like
many patches may not be installed properly if they try to write to the
central /opt (and perhaps to /usr or other places as well); any ideas
about this?

BTW, we use depot for distribution of all of our locally-installed software
currently. Is anyone using depot with /opt software?

Can anyone from Sun tell us how Sun does this internally?

Many thanks,
-keith

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