[arch-general] Updating iputils over NFS

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 01.10.2012 15:21, schrieb Paul Gideon Dann:
> On Monday 01 Oct 2012 14:22:41 Thomas Bächler wrote:
>> IMO, root file systems on NFS are a failure by design anyway - I worked
>> in such a scenario for years and it is a bad bad bad idea. While we
>> should fix easy problems such as this one, we should not spend too much
>> time on making this work.
> 
> I'd be really interested in your reasons for this.  I'm running a network-
> booted cluster, and things seem much easier using NFS for this than it would 
> be to have a hard disk in each node and use puppet (or similar) for 
> administration.

We have a 100MBit/s network, which may or may not be the bottleneck
Loading a modern desktop environment like KDE over NFS just takes too
long. A user needs to wait up to 5 minutes after login, starting
applications isn't instant, everything feels like 10 years ago
speed-wise. The same goes for boot times.

The worst part however is that booting a Linux system over NFS never
works quite right out of the box, you need too many tricks to make it
work smoothly.

As lot of the OS is shared, upgrading parts of the system while it is
running leads to problems. There is no way to share the entire system
EXCEPT a number of config files.

All my machines now have a small hard drive or SSD and have an option in
the boot menu to sync an updated operating system on reboot - this uses
rsync and --exclude to omit certain config files that are per-machine.
Administration of this scheme has proven much easier and more robust
than the old NFS-based one.


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