id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	resolution	keywords	cc
22	NFS-mounted /tmp is a bad idea	andersk		"(Imported from [https://help.mit.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=432614 help.mit.edu #432614].)

andersk:
  While upgrading packages on scripts4, I received strange errors that I think can be attributed to our shared /tmp directory. We need to find a better solution. (This has made me uncomfortable for a long time, I'm just adding this to our todo list.)

andersk:
  This is now one of ghudson's selling points for cobwebs:
  http://scripts.mit.edu/~ghudson/blog/?p=13
  so we should fix it as soon as possible. :-)
  
  Here are some options I see:
  
  1. Keep the NFS solution and try to hack something to solve the failover problem.
  2. Unshare /tmp and stop pretending we only have one server.
  3. Unshare /tmp, but move PHP sessions and other similar data to some other shared directory (involving one of the other solutions).
  4. Put /tmp in AFS somewhere.
  5. Experiment with Coda, which I believe is supposed to support what we need.
  
  Thoughts?
  
  I think I'm happiest with either 2 or 3+5. Did we ever find specific examples of popular scripts that depend on a shared /tmp?

jbarnold:
  I think that we previously found that some scripts cache data in /tmp, and they expect this data to be either not-there or entirely-up-to-date; they do not expect it to be in an old state.
  
  I think that #2 might hard to get right.
  
  I've considered putting /tmp into AFS, and that option might be the best one.
"	defect	closed	minor		web	fixed