NFS alternative

[f. halili]

We have an NFS mounted filesystem on some of our systems. This usally holds the scripts, patch depots that are common to to the systems.

What is an alternative of doing this? I've installed Bastille on one of the machines, and it's not recommending NFS mounts.

Thanks,
f. halili

[Jeff_Traigle · Accepted solution]

A couple of options come to mind:

1. Ignore Bastille's recommendation. It's a generic recommendation. Only your local security policies and system requirements can determine if it should be followed or not.

or

2. Maintain the scripts on each system. (Possibly rsync from a master server to make this manageable.) The depots don't need to be directly accessible on each server anyway.

[Lynn Hsu_2]

some people use automounter. Then you need to modify /etc/auto_master file to add your
mount point there.

Lynn

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

Answer on your question depends on assigment of the file system, it's size and data importance.
If data size is small, the preferable solution is local FS with syncronization to the master FS by rsync or rdist, otherwise NFS is preferable. You can use automout NFS as well. This is very convenient, just take into account that this option has a small delay when mounts FS.

HTH

[Bill Hassell]

Bastille reports that NFS is an unsecured product and indeed it is. Now within a coporate environment, it is much safer than across the Internet. But NFS is also quite fragile. Networking problems will hang all the clients -- not a good thing. NFS provides realtime data but many times you don't need that speed -- updating the scripts daily or every few hours may be acceptable in which case, NFS can be disabled.

Note that patch and application depots do not need NFS. The SD product has its own network communication and is the preferred network update method. So on the depot server, just register the depots: swreg

And on clients, swlist -l depot @ your_server

To install a remote depot:

swinstall -s your_server:/fullpath-to-depot \*

[f. halili]

Thanks for the inputs!