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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!fwi.uva.nl!casper
- From: casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik)
- Subject: Re: Rdist questions..
- Message-ID: <1992Dec28.171155.17615@fwi.uva.nl>
- Sender: news@fwi.uva.nl
- Nntp-Posting-Host: adam.fwi.uva.nl
- Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam
- References: <BzyBCB.G97@babbage.ece.uc.edu> <1992Dec28.144613.2009@siemens.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 17:11:55 GMT
- Lines: 39
-
- aad@siemens.com (Anthony Datri) writes:
-
- >>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.
-
- Except that programs run on NFS clients will still abort with core
- dumps. But because of the renaming rdist does, it is possible
- to work around this problem as well by making a hardlinked shadow
- tree using ``find | cpio -pdmlv''.
-
- >>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.
-
- It's not different, as long as you keep a copy of the old file around,
- either because it's in use by the local system or because you have
- made a link in a shadow tree.
-
- >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".
-
- When we use rdist to rdist a newly installed package that has a number
- of files spread out over a filesystem that isn't to be mirrored in full,
- we use things like: rdist -c `find /usr/local -mtime -1 -print` therhost:
-
- Casper
-