SUMMARY: Cross-platform file sharing in NIS

I got a few replies which answered the immediately obvious, that is to use
the $CPU and/or $HOST Map Variables. This is not what I was looking for. The
real issue is that in my environment  X64 and SPARC binaries locations are
going to be read-only, to take care of failover of these partitions, I
simply cannot put them in a single location on a file server. I will not be
able to mount it on a particular platform and install the binaries directly
(they are automounted read-only file systems).

Thanks to Richard Skelton who provided the right solution to this problem.
His solution is given below:

==Richard Skelton says:

What we do is to modify /etc/rc2.d/S74autofs on each client:-
'start')
       umask 0

       Server="filer01"
       Platform="SunOS_5.9_sparc_all"
       echo "Starting automountd5.6 (Server: $Server, Platform: $Platform)"
       #
       # Start daemon here
       #
       /usr/lib/autofs/automountd -D SERVER=$Server -D
PLATFORM=$Platform  </de
v/null >/dev/msglog 2>&1
       echo "."
       echo "Do mounts"
       /usr/sbin/automount -t 300              # do mounts
       echo "."
       ;;

'stop')
This is for a Sparc client. For an X86 client we would replace
SunOS_5.9_sparc_all with SunOS_5.10_intel_all

The the auto_direct map cab have for example:-
/opt/studio11            -rw,hard,intr  $SERVER:/vol/vol1/studio11/$PLATFORM

On the filer the /vol/vol1/studio11 directory contains:-
rskelton: ls
Linux_2.2_i586_all/    SunOS_5.10_sparc_all@  SunOS_5.9_sparc_all@
Linux_2.4_i686_all@    SunOS_5.8_sparc_all/ SunOS_5.10_intel_all/


==
It works like a charm :-)
I never knew we could set our own Variables into automountd. Learnt
something new. Much thanks to all who cared to reply. My original post is
shown below:

--SF

On 2/15/07, Sun Manager <sunfired@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello fellow managers,
>
> I am trapped in a kind of hole trying to figure out how best to accomplish
> the task of sharing different binaries across different OS platforms from a
> single location and at the same time provide for a fail-over of this shared
> space using autofs in a NIS environment. I am afraid this post  is going to
> be long trying to best explain my situation. I searched high and low for an
> answer but could not find any that had my particular situation.
>
> All our servers, so far have been SPARC machines running Solaris 9. So
> there has been  no need think about cross platform so far. However we will
> soon be procuring X64 Servers that run Solaris 10 and I plan to put them in
> the same domain as the other SPARC machines. Currently we have a shared
> partition containing public domain tools (binaries) that are compiled and
> hosted from a SPARC server in the network. This partition is mounted using a
> direct map under the name /netopt and this is a read-only file system
> because it is maintained as a fail-over partition. Its clone resides on
> another nfs server, another SPARC. Whenever a new tool is compiled, I login
> locally on the nfs server and compile and install the tool. The clone
> machine copies everthing over in a minute and the tool become available in
> the NIS domain. The problem with this arrangement will surface when the X64
> servers are added to the network. Then, even though there is a way in NIS to
> use Map Variables to access platform specific binaries in /netopt, there
> seems to be no way I can compile and install platform specific binaries into
> /netopt because of the read-only filesystem requirement for fail-over. I
> don't want to use the cross-compiling features of gcc. What I thought
> instead was to have one of the X64 servers to serve X64 binaries under the
> same /netopt mountpoint. This way I can login to the X64 host to compile and
> install new tools but I can't see a way to make the auto_direct map to
> conditionally serve up the tools from either platform in accordance to where
> the requests originates from. To clarify:
>
> For example:
> if
> binaries in sparc resides in <sparc host>:/usr2/netopt
> and binaries in x64 resides in <x64 host>:/usr2/netopt
> are mapped directly to /netopt
>
> and if a user on x64 types the command:
> cd /netopt
>
> is there a way to configure auto_direct maps to see that the request is
> coming from a X64 client and hence to mount /netopt from the <X64 host>
>
> I hope my problem is clearly stated. I appreciate your response and
> insight into solving this issue once and for all.
>
> Thanks
> SF
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers