Program sharing on NFS

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1

I am not sure is this plausible...

I have just built a NFS master server on a solaris box (secured by NIS)
And I have a dozen of virtual machines running 32 and 64 bits linux and windows, running different types of servers.

I am not sure is it possible to move most of the programs to the NFS and have symbolic links pointing to the location on the NFS. This way all vm will be able to have the same versions of program for consistency (such as all Win2008R2 will have a symbolic link "shortcut", or /bin directory in Linux will be replaced by symbolic links pointing to a bin directory on NFS).

for example, a simple "ls" I already have 3 different versions on 3 different 64-bit linux distributions, so I would like to "standardize" it for a consistent development environment

2

Yes you can, this is routinely done.

3

so... do I create different groups for different os/architectures and give them permission to access its resources, so that linux ia32 cannot access x64 resources?

4

You can only centralize as much as the hardware/OS allows you. There is no need to export/mount linux-x64 programs on ia32 machines.

So you should organize the nfs share, and export the programs that are relevant for certain architecture only to those machines.
I'd try to have the same machines similar IP addresses, e.g.:
linux x64: 192.168.0.x
ai32: 192.168.1.x
etc

then on NFS server, you'd have the programs for each arch:

/nfs/linux-x64/*
/nfs/ai32/*

etc.

Define network groups (@linux64, @ai32, ...) in /etc/netgroup and exports:

/nfs/linux-x64 @linux64(options)
/nfs/ai32 @ai32(options)

Restart nfs services, then on client machines you mount them where you want, e.g. on linux machine in /etc/fstab:

nfsserver:/nfs/linux-x64 /usr/common options

You could tighten the security with hosts.{deny,allow} if you are really paranoid.

These instructions are very crude, I admit, but you get the idea.

5

As I am quite green to un*x, can somebody tell me how do I achieve that?

For example, I want to install emacs on NFS. Its a .tar.gz file and it is quite large and got dir and files to be install to different directories

What do I do first?
Do I install in one machine first? or do I have to arrange everything manually? or do I have to write script for the other machines for installation? any tools available for these tasks?
Can someone please guide me thru? Thanks very much.

6

You may or may not be able to do this. Linux commands and utilities are portable at the source code level but not necessarily portable at the binary level.

7

There is some special work overhead with applications on NFS, i.e. you cannot simply install a package (RPM or PKG) on a master server.
I think it only will pay back if over 50 systems share one application.
If you have a zoo of virtual systems where every system is different, you better install applications locally on each system.