Sidebar: The Package Mounting Scheme

The Portland State University Computer Science Department maintains a large UNIX environment. One of their many helpful tools is an NFS server organization that allows for efficient use of the automounter. Sets of UNIX tools are collected into packages that can be mounted as coherent collections of files. These packages are usually referenced from a single indirect map entry. So a user can find GNU tools in /pkgs/gnu and LabView software in /pkgs/labview. The lead UNIX support person, Eric Bergren, has even come up with an elegant scheme to allow users to interactively add and delete packages from their user environment. A few shell scripts and a text file with all the package information allow Eric to provide a flexible, friendly, and efficient UNIX environment. For more information about Eric's "package" scheme, send email to packages@fork.com requesting the source scripts.