I have about 45 Linux (Redhat 7.3) workstations that I will soon be {upgrading to | reinstalling with} Fedora. Currently they each mount an NFS filesystem at /pkg into which I install updated packages (such as openoffice, gnu development toolchain tools, mozilla, etc., etc.). I am planning on doing away with the NFS mounting since people will often complain about poor performance (programs take too long to load from /pkg, etc.). My current plan is to rsync /pkg every night on each machine using an rsync server. I have two test machines setup and this is working fairly well. The rsync will be run via cron. The script which will run the rsync will sleep $[ $RANDOM / 60 ] seconds before performing the rsync so the machines aren't hitting the rsync server all at once at 3AM. Does anyone have any comments on this plan, similar experiences, etc.? In addition, in the old /pkg I would (when the package supported it) use `--prefix=/pkg' as the argument to configure. This was all fine and dandy until we wanted two, or more, versions of the same package installed. Instead in the new /pkg I will use `--prefix=/pkg/<pkg_name><pkg_name_version>` as an argument to configure and create a symbolic link at /pkg/current_version which points to the default version. This way I can have multiple versions of the same package installed without the new version clobbering the old, and the man pages can be found for the package that is actually in your $PATH. Again, does anyone have any comments on this plan, similar experiences, etc.? - Mike
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