28 Jan 2003 trage   » (Apprentice)

There's a few projects that I would like to work on this week. I'd like to get an updated version of SeminarSite out before next month. A lot of people have made certain requests and I'd like to implement all of them and release the product. People can download the CVS version if they wish, I suppose.

Here at the School of Computer Science, we have a neat little system called the 'Depot'. The Depot comprises of various mounted drives on a multitude of servers and architectures. Each directory in the Depot is a symbolic link pointing to compilied binares on an unmounted disk. When a user requests this particular directory, the drive is automounted and the binaries for the specific architecture is retireved. The depot automatically mounts the appropriate software package in acordance to the architecture of the machine. This saves lots of time for the lazy system administrator. We don't have to install non-standard packages of software on every workstation and we can make updates from a single host.

The documentation for the depot system is in a state of disarray. I have been assigned to the task of sorting it out last year, but it has fallen downhill since then. I made a generic information file to be customized and inserted in each directory. A nightly script mounts each directory and retrieves the information and consolidates it into a single file. (I probably should use XML someday.) A couple PHP scripts interprets this data into easily navigatable web pages. I call it "DepotDoc".

Oh well, off to work I go!

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