• Preserved the disk partitions but remade the file systems on them as otherwise the install would have proceeded to copy them into the pre-existing filesystem which would result in old files being left in what should be a new install.

• As noted, I took the output of dpkg --get-selections from Mike Patterson (availabe in this Wiki somewhere) and ran sent them into the input of dpkg --set-selections on glspare0
• ran lsof -i to see what services were running. Got rid of some services like talk
• Created the Xhier directory structure that has to exist prior to actually putting Xhier on the machine
  • Usually the main Xhier tree is placed under /fsys? mount point. So in this case I did:

            mkdir /.software/regional /vendor /xhbin
            mkdir -p /fsys/.software/{arch,share,spool,local,admin}
            ln -s /fsys/.software/* /.software
            

• NOTE. /.software/regional is an NFS mount point to a Network Appliance Fileserver and consequently doesn't get put under /fsys, mostly for estetic reasons.
• Edited cscf.cs:/.software/admin/xhier/data/access-rights (using RCS) and put in the line: glspare0.student.cs debian31.cscf to allow for distribution of xhier from debian31.cscf to glspare0.student.cs.
• Ran xh-distribute -h debian31.cscf xhier on cscf.cs
• To allow xhiering of glspare0.student.cs I did
  • create .shosts file with some appropriate entries and then hardlinked .rhosts to it
  • apt-get install rsh-server rsh-client
  • edited /etc/hosts.allow to allow hosts we want to have access and put in ALL:ALL in /etc/hosts.deny
  • checked that rsh glspare0 ls -al worked on debian31.cscf
  • ran xh-first-time -v -h glspare0.student.cs on debian31.cscf as root
  • xh-dist2 glspare0.student.cs debian-1 (this should really be made to happen automatically when running xh-first-time, or at least that would be a nice feature)

Passwd and Group Files Management

• It doesn't work as it should. At least not using setpw xhier package. Ultimately the active directory server should be used (via LDAP?) to manage accounts. Now to document the problems with setpw:
  • The passwd file management works. Specifically the file glspare0.student.cs:/software/setpw/data/config/exempt-users contains a list of userids, one per line. containing the Debian vendor userid prior to setpw management of the file. There was a problem of truncation to the first 8 characters. Ray Butterworth corrected this problem.
  • The group file management breaks badly. Specifically if one adds some entries (for example Debian-exim4) to glspare0.student.cs:/software/setpw/data/config/exempt-groups the entry is totally blown away. Other problems include changing the GID and the users contained in those groups are also not preserved.

I could not get xh-make-links to put in the asserted version of openssl_runtime on sun580. It turns out it looks at /software/xhier/data/standard-packages which gets updated once a week via xh-update-standard-packages. Looking at it one see that openssl-0.9.8 wasn't in it...actually it was. Hmmm further investigation is warranted. Perhaps further reading of manpage will reveal the secret. Doing a verbose of xh-update-standard-packages shows that defaultPath=no prevents this...