[svlug] Mount Points

[Jonathan Sergent]

In message <199811160307.TAA32721 at polly.mall-net.com>, Javilk writes:
 ]      Is there a reasonably standard way of doing this kind of stuff that
 ] doesn't end up with huge path names?  Does a symbolic link generate yet
 ] another head seek, or two? (Head seeks being the slowest part of the whole
 ] process.)

At least in 2.1.x, this data is cached very efficiently... so if you
symlink an entire directory, there will be maybe one disk access the 
first time you access a file in the tree, and the entries should stay 
cached for the rest of the time.

It's often convenient to use amd or autofs to manage the symlinks...
you do take a performance hit from using amd, though, I think... some
context switches since it's just a user space fake NFS server. But
autofs should be faster.

You can use amd and autofs to manage symlinks even if the targets
are all on the same system.  It's just often convenient to be able
to use some of the macro capabilities of amd maps and to have all
of the information in one place, and even more convenient when you
have lots of machines that you don't want to go edit manually.

 ]     I've also been using /aux-n and /otherMachineName directories off
 ] root, and /tmp/task to share task information between some of my machines.
 ] What is the convention on such things? 

There's no convention ... most sites are internally consistent on this
sort of thing, but not even that.

All of the schemes work to some degree, and every hardened sysadmin
seems to have their preferences as to how to do it, so there are 
really infinitely many other ways to do it.

I've seen:
Server partition        Client mountpoint       Contents
--
/export/home/x          /home/servername/x      homedirs, projects, etc.
/export/package/x       /package                software packages -- client
                                                mounts subdirs of package
                                                from closest server with pkg.
--
/site/hostname/x/foo    /u/foo                  homedirs, projects, packages
--
/exportX/home/foo       /home/foo               homedirs
/exportX/y              /net/server/exportX/y   everything else
X = {,1,2,3,4,...}


--jss.

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