[OpenAFS] Package Management in AFS

[Andy Cobaugh]

On 2010-12-20 at 19:34, Dirk Heinrichs ( dirk.heinrichs@altum.de ) said:
> Am 20.12.2010 19:26, schrieb Booker Bense:
>
>> My 2 cents... Outside of a few very specialized apps, putting software
>> in AFS is a losing proposition these days. Since local disk space is
>> growing so fast, there really is little justification for not simply
>> using the package management system
>> of the OS and simply installing locally.

Can't agree more. We use stow to install certain pieces of software into 
AFS, usually one-off and standalone scientific software (we're in 
bioinformatics).

For everything else, we use the package manager. RPMs really are easy to 
make. Perhaps even easier than installing the same app in AFS. Even if 
there was something like rpm for afs, that would only make the two methods 
(installing on local disk or installing in afs) equivalent (ignoring any 
issues of permission). This also assumes you're running the same version 
of the same OS everywhere (for example, we use @sys symlinks, but in our 
environment amd64_linux26 isn't the same everywhere).

Follow the principal of least work: Is it more work to install an app into 
AFS, or yum/apt-get/etc install.

> That would again mean that the sw had to be installed over and over
> again, on every single machine. That may be OK for 2 or 5 machines, but
> for a larger number this becomes a tedious task. And what about diskless
> clients?

That's what cfengine or puppet are for. IMO, any time you have to manage 2 
or more machines, you really do need something like cfengine to do 
complete configuration. If you can't blow away entire machines and have 
them automatically reinstall and converge back to their previous state, 
then you're really not managing your systems.

--andy