[arch-general] Updating iputils over NFS

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Monday 01 Oct 2012 15:34:41 Thomas Bächler wrote:
> 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.

Makes sense.  I would certainly think twice for something as complex as a full 
interactive desktop setup.  I hold by NFS for this cluster, though.

I really like your sync-on-boot solution.  I'd like to store this information 
away for future use.  How did you implement it?  Something in an initrd hook?

Paul