>
> Hi ,
> In our Institute (Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland) we are having
> a heterogeneous environment with computers consisting of Sun, Dec Unix,
> IBM, VMS and a number of PC's, Mac's and starting with NT machines. I have
> the following questions:
>
> 1. Whether any AFS installations is using AFS for SW distribution?
We are.
> 2. Is it advisable to use AFS for SW distribution in our environment?
Yes for any AFS client workstation.
> 3. How do you distribute the SW in your environment?
Most AFS clients use the software directly out of AFS. Some clients
replicate all or part of their software from AFS to local disk.
Some non-AFS workstations mount AFS via NFS. Solitary machines use FTP to
replicate the software to their local disk. (My laptop uses a diskette for
the transfer. :-)
Since other nearby (and not-so-near) sites use the same installation concept
we can replicate binaries from these sites. So we don't have to install
TeX at every Univesity. It is installed in Heidelberg and replicated
to Stuttgart, Hohenheim, Tuebingen,...
Documentation for this software installation concept (called "/sw")
can be found in /afs/rus.uni-stuttgart.de/sw/doc. (Most of it in german!)
> 4. Can you suggest some SW, if not AFS, for SW distribution?
DCE/DFS, NFS, FTP or a lot of COTS (commercial of the shelf) software.
"/sw" is an installation concept with a set of standards, not a distribution
software, but I _do_ recommend it! :-)
> 5. For what purpose AFS is used in your site?
For user home directories and software "distribution" (and whatever else you
need a distributed file system for...).
> Iam also looking for a SW for configuration management of our systems.
> Is there any SW available for this purpose? I would like to have a SW
> which automatically reads the HW information(configuration info) and enters
> in a databank. If you can give some information regarding to this subject
> Iam very much thankful.
I'm trying out the GNU cfengine. It works pretty well in our environment.
But it does not collect "hardware" information into a database. (You could
advise it to do so, but in our case it's not necessary.) It configures the
local workstation according to one global configuration (in AFS of course :-).
There are somewhat more sophisticated commercial systems like Tivoli,
CA-Unicenter, Venus from science+computing, GenuAdmin,...
Tobias Schaefer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
