Sharing /usr with NFS

[Pafnoutios]

I have a small home network. It consists of my computer, my wife's computer, and our server. The server acts as a login, file sharing, and print server. I already have NIS and NFS set up properly, and am sharing the /home directory between all three machines.
Most network setups, to my understanding, have the major programs also hosted on servers to not waste storage space on multiple workstations. I want to try this, but I don't think I can just export my server's /usr directory.

My server is a headless P133, my computer is an AthlonXP Barton 1.833GHz, my wife's is an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz. If I compile a program from source, would I have to do it on the server so it's fully i386 compatible or can I compile it on one of my faster machines and pass certain 'do not optimize' options to gcc?

What about the libraries under /usr/lib, don't they have some machine dependent files (like graphics and video) that shouldn't be shared? What if two different machines were to try running the same program at the same time? Can that be done generally, or can only certain programs that are programmed for it have multiple instances?

I was thinking of using OpenOffice and Mozilla that way. I know I can't use Neverwinter Nights like that; I do have a legal CD key for each machine, but I have scripts that alter the nwn directory structure uniquely for each user upon execution.

Logistically speaking, how can I go about doing this. I tried doing a search, but all I could find was NFS how-tos using /usr or a subdirectory thereof as the example directory.

Thank you,

Pafnoutios

[Jinx]

Gday Pafnoutios,

I am no expert at this, as I am only just sort of starting to investigate the possiblity of using a network resource to run multiple apps on other machines.

From my understanding you probably wouldn't host out the P133 Server's /usr, but would probably host a /usr for the two workstations under another directory. Eg. /home/shared/usr... then mount that as the /usr on your workstations....

As I said, I have not tried this, but I would assume this would be the better way to do things. Another thing to check out would be Linux Terminal Services... as that would definately deal with shared network-based resources (http://www.ltsp.org/).

As far as I know you can run multiple instances of the same application, so long as data is not being modified at the same time as the other computer(s)... so I am pretty sure programs in /usr would be fine to be used in multiple instances.

That probably doesn't tell you much more than you already know, but thought it better than saying nothing. ;)

Cya round
Jinx

[JsPr]

Hi,
One way to start and run a program on another computer/server is to use ssh like this:

ssh -X host full_path_to_binary

You will have to supply a password and have an account on the remote server. This way the program runs on that server and not on your computer. If you use KDE you could create a "Link to application" on your desktop to start this app.
I use it to start YAST on the server.

[bandwidth_pig]

I was just going to recommend the same thing (ssh to run the apps you want to run). I think you can accomplish what you want with exporting /usr via NFS. Well, heck...you could. And for the libs, just export those directories as well and add those directories within the users path? Bet it would work. But ssh would be a whole lot simpler.