Supporting multiple flavours of UNIX

[vivekm]

Hi,

I am looking at solutions for minimising maintenance issues regarding several flavours of UNIX that we are currently supporting. Since I am talking about developmental platforms with minimal network and CPU traffic at most times, performance is not a hot issue.

My question is that how can I minimise the number of Servers required to maintain all these flavours of UNIX? Currently, we have one seperate server per UNIX flavour. Is this the only way we can do it?

Thanks for your response in advance.

Regards,
Vivek

 

[edfair]

How many servers, how many employees using them.
My solution to what I read into your post is a removable SCSI caddy with a separate drive per supported version. But there would need to be some standardization applied if the drives would be swapped between machines. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[vivekm]

There are five developers supporting six versions of UNIX. With your solution, at any one time, only one flavour of UNIX can be supported. I need to be having all systems accessible in parallel(forgetting system crashes, etc.).

Regards,
Vivek

 

[edfair]

You have choices to make.
Probable best solution is 6 servers and allowing any and all to log into any and all from separately used workstations over a lan. This way there is never any diruption except for compiling or rebuilding. But I've seen problems develop when multiple users are making changes at the same time.
I've used a central login server for one location, but it limited the three users to three of five systems (lack of phone lines) and kept them separated.


Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[MikeLacey]

vivek,

There *are* some solutions that let you run other operating systems on a single machine - but they are designed to support many machines rather than 5 or 6 (I'm thinking, for example, of the AS/400 running multiple copies of Linux)

You will have a much lower maintenance load running seperate servers for each flavour of operating system. Mike
________________________________________________________________

"Experience is the comb that Nature gives us, after we are bald."

Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.

 

[Locus1]

I am relatively new to UNIX and not a programmer, so there may be some problems with what I propose.

One can run multiple operating systems on the same box (one at a time) using partitions. Assuming your hardware can support it and assuming UNIX can run in a logical partition (as Linux can), I would partition each developers hard drive to support each of the flavours of UNIX. Something like Boot Magic will provide a Boot Menu to select the flavour to be run at that time.

I would keep the development files on a central server to which each development system would have access.

This would also give the administrator an opportunity to provide operating system updates to the development systems.

Also, D. J. Bernstein has suggested a method of service configuration (

http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/faq.html)

that might make software development a little easier. It might also simply cross-flavour development.

Hope this core dump helps.

Locus1