Re: Great SWT Program

blmblm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
It may be asking for trouble, but it's not that easy to avoid in
the setup at my current place of employment, in which we have a
couple of dozen Linux systems sharing a password/file/etc. server.
Users' home directories, which is where the configuration files
live (where else?!), are shared by all machines. When we do

Is that to say, /home/fooperson resides on a particular server, and is mapped to each other node through NFS or some other remote-mounting mechanism?

the yearly software (and sometimes hardware) upgrades, it often
happens that there's a period of some days or weeks during which
some of the machines are running the old stuff and some are
running the new stuff. It's those periods in which the trouble I

That puzzles me. The PATH directories should be shared, thus rendering it impossible for correctly-mapped nodes to run different things.

Still, I suppose it's always inevitable that some config information is specific to a node. But days or weeks worth?

described arises, because typically the applications use the same
user-specific configuration files (e.g., /home/someuser/.gnome/*).
If you want to say that no software can be expected to behave
reasonably in those circumstances, I won't argue. If you want
to say that it's suboptimal to not upgrade all the machines at
the same time, I won't argue with that either, but personpower
for doing upgrades is finite.

I'd want to say that a more normal upgrade procedure should be in place, since one admin should be able to manage upwards of a hundred nodes, by industry average. Clearly the fault lies in the process, that it should take more than about an hour to upgrade the entire network.

The problem here doesn't seem like personpower, it seems like brainpower. Sounds like you need a patch to the sysadmin.

Am I missing something here?

--
Lew
.

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