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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!udel!princeton!siemens!aad
- From: aad@siemens.com (Anthony Datri)
- Subject: Re: Rdist questions..
- Message-ID: <1992Dec28.144613.2009@siemens.com>
- Sender: news@siemens.com (NeTnEwS)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: lovecraft
- Organization: Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton (Plainsboro), NJ
- References: <BzyBCB.G97@babbage.ece.uc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 14:46:13 GMT
- Lines: 36
-
- >How does rdist handle programs that are actively running on the
- >remote host..
-
- Typically the rdistd/rdist -S on the remote machine will rename the old copy
- and unlink it, so running processes should be unaffected by that act. Of
- course, if it's part of a bigger package, you could have the problem of it
- getting incompatible versions of other parts of the package while the rdist
- is going on, but if you dist at night usually not much is going on.
-
- >For example, if someone is running X windows
- >and you rdist a new copy of X windows to his fileserver
- >does rdist to the right thing and either unlink or rename
- >has program to keep from over writing the disk image..
-
- In this case, you're perhaps going to end up replacing shared libaries that the
- running processes are using, which is a whole different ball of wax, especially
- if you're going from R4 to R5 with the incompatible Xaw library. It's best to
- have your users exit from their X sessions before you dist X.
-
- >Finally, do any of you use "sup" or "track" instead
- >to keep your software distributions up to date??? (for people
- >how do not know "sup" and "track" pull instead of push the
- >new files..
-
- I used rdist in a previous life to manage an extensive set of software, and
- while rdist has its problems, I was able to work around most of them with cron
- and some truly evil use of "special".
-
- One problem with "pull" arrangements is that it can be difficult to centrally
- deal with things that really do need to be centrally managed.
-
- There's a "depot" developed at CMU that has some promise. No, it's not the
- other, more famous "depot".
- --
-
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