Date: Mon, 05 Feb 1996 10:22:05 -0500 From: Andrew Heybey <ath@bellcore.com> To: Doug Rabson <dfr@render.com> Cc: "Karl Denninger, MCSNet" <karl@mcs.com>, "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: And the winner is! Message-ID: <199602051522.KAA02892@grapenuts.bellcore.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 05 Feb 1996 12:22:18 %2B0000. <Pine.BSF.3.91.960205121828.17901M-100000@minnow.render.com>
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dfr> It seems like one could use sup to keep systems in sync. dfr> Basically, you would run a supserver on the 'code server' and dfr> regularly sup the client systems against it. The sup config dfr> files allow you to do stuff like run ranlib on /usr/lib/lib*.a, dfr> execute newaliases when /etc/aliases changes, don't take dfr> specific files from /etc/ which are per-system. Yes, sup would work and has some advantages (for one thing reconcile needs the server to be NFS mounted). For me it was a matter of being familiar with reconcile. Also, reconcile does several things that I don't know if sup can do: 1. Map from one file name to another. For example, one could have /etc/sysconfig.CLIENT (since the server probably wants a different configuration in its /etc/sysconfig) which gets copied to /etc/sysconfig on the clients. [Speaking of which, if one wants to set up several machines, it is somewhat obnoxious that the hostname and interfaces are hard-wired in sysconfig. I like hostname.* files better instead of running sed on sysconfig. Just MHO.] 2. Reconcile won't touch files on the client that have changed. Not just files that are newer on the client (which is what I gather sup can do (from a cursory inspection of the man page)). Reconcile keeps a database of the mtimes (or ctimes, I'm not sure) of the files so as tell if the file has changed on the client. I happen to like this feature--if something changes on the client it is probably for a reason and one doesn't want the change wiped out just because the rest of the client's file system is being kept up to date. 3. Reconcile can automatically create symlinks to the server instead of copying if you want to save disk space on the client. (Again, this assumes a LAN and NFS mounting of the server.) For example on the machines I set up, /usr/src -> /server/user/src. andrew
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