Last week I asked the following question:
> I am trying to use rdist to keep up to date two servers with the
> following distfile:
>
> master-server# cat /tmp/distfile
> EXCEPT = ( /usr/export /usr/kvm /usr/lost+found /usr/share )
> /usr -> slave-server
> except ${EXCEPT} ;
> install -R /export/exec/sun3.sunos.4.1.1 ;
>
> unfortunately I'm running into problems with hard linked files. For
> instance on the master-server /usr/bin/chsh is hard linked to
> /usr/bin/passwd but changing the destination directory confuses rdist:
>
> updating: /usr/bin/chsh
> rdist: vivaldi:can't link /export/exec/sun3.sunos.4.1.1/bin/chsh to \
> /usr/bin/passwd
>
> So the question is: is there any way to tell rdist that chsh should be
> linked to /export/exec/sun3.sunos.4.1.1/bin/passwd instead?
Btw, I needed to do this because we have a sun4 heterogeneous server
that needs to be updated from a master sun3 server. Using "install -h"
does help because now all the symbolic links get screwed up...
The short answer is that rdist is not smart enough to let you do this
without screwing up on hard linked files. A workaround that now works
for us has been suggested by Jay Plett:
> From: "Jay Plett" <jay@princeton.edu>
> To: leo@ai.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: problems with rdist
> Date: Tue, 23 Jun 92 10:45:45 EDT
>
> The way I worked around the problem was by having an
> "intermediary" pathname on one or both of the systems involved,
> with the desired pathname(s) replaced with symlinks pointing to
> the intermediary.
>
> Sometimes it helps to have a neutral system involved, although
> this implies a good deal more network traffic. For example,
> assume that the source you want to rdist is rooted at /foo on
> machine alpha. You want to rdist it to /dest on machine beta.
> Select a machine, gamma, for which no directory /foo is needed.
> mount beta:/dest on gamma:/foo. Do the rdist from alpha to
> gamma. The files will then be correctly updated in beta:/dest.
> In the worst case, you could use two intermediary machines so
> that you would have completely redundant NFS-mounted filesystems
> with the same pathname mounted on each.
Thanks a lot to:
From: "Anthony A. Datri" <datri@concave.convex.com>
From: Jay Plett <jay@silence.princeton.nj.us>
From: fabrice@life.net (Fabrice Guerini)
From: JAMES_M._ZIOBRO.WBST102A@xerox.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:44 CDT