Hi Michael, Michael Hannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I'd like to know how others are dealing with this. Is anybody using > Ubuntu clients with SL servers for instance? Any other words of > wisdom on this topic? In our group we run Debian on our cluster, workstations and some laptops. We are collaborators on two experiments that have picked some flavor (MINOS with SLF and Daya Bay with SLC) of SL as the dominant platform. For the most part there are no problems in terms of client/server communication. The two real issues I have experienced are: 1) Fermi Kerberos (not really an SL issue, per se). Debian's openssh-client package does't have kerberos support and if you use the kerberized ones and place your workstation inside FNAL.GOV realm you will suffer long timeouts when connecting to systems not known to the realm servers. For this reason I run the standard openssh client and keep an "ssh-krb" client for when logging in to FNAL. 2) Reliance on binary libraries produced in a monolithic culture. Be aware Debian is marginalized or completely ignored by the big high energy / nulcear physics software developers (LHC and RHIC groups to name some). Binary libraries built on SL, particularly C++ based ones, will very likely not work on Debian, even when used with a matching GCC. As physicists are want to do, these package are sometimes built with baroque (broke) build systems and may be very difficult to build by non experts. If you need such software you should take this into consideration. But, imo, these difficulties are insignificant when compared to the benefits of using Debian relative to SL. -Brett.