(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
"Minh" == Ha Duong Minh <minh.ha.duong_at_cmu.edu> writes: > Minh> While I understand there are many advantages to have files > Minh> under /coda, I have not found in the doc how to make this > Minh> consistent with the File Hierarchy Standard. On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 12:27:50PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > FHS is mandated for Linux distributions. This makes interoperability > of utilities much simpler. But local admins do not have to conform if > they have reason not to. /home -> /coda/home seems like a good reason > for varying from FHS to me. You will usually find that the symbolic link such as /home -> /coda/home is actually allowed by the FHS, as long as you can reach the required object through the standard path. I have set up systems in which /usr is in fact a link to somewhere in /coda; obviously this means that you can't install coda itself anywhere under /usr. The real pain is tweaking any Linux distribution to deal with shared /usr on a particular client. This is one reason why I feel the distributions and both rpm and dpkg fail to support this kind of installation adequately. > You might > also want to do this for some of the caches (eg, TeX's fonts) under > /var, but you wouldn't want to do it for /var itself. Certainly not for log files or other machine-specific stuff. But it is possible to put an amazing amount into Coda. One solution I tried was to have a skeleton /usr with the commands needed before Coda starts in it; when the root disk is mounted we have ln -snf /path-to-skel-usr /usr and then after Coda starts, we can add the command ln -snf /coda/path-to-full-usr /usr to the startup scripts; similarly when shutting down. There is a tool which is part of AFS called package which (in an awkward way) allows you to manage machines centrally by maintaining symbolic links and local copies of files; you would need a more sophisticated version with pre- and post- copy features for some cases, but it's not that difficult to write. With AFS I was able to mount / nosuid, and to have all suid and sgid programs in AFS. With Coda you can put the suid programs there, but not sgid, of course. (Thus in the previous example, where /usr is a link into /coda, /usr/bin/man may have to be a link out of /coda, if it is a sgid program.) These are among the issues that an installation which makes full use of Coda (or of AFS) must investigate and solve. -- Owen LeBlanc_at_mcc.ac.ukReceived on 2001-02-15 01:56:10