Cross-Org Software Administration

    While leading computer systems support for the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility of the National Institute of Standards and Technology I devised and helped to develop a Network Filesystem based software installation sharing scheme, the Depot.

    In the early days of commercial networked file systems I led computer systems support for an automated manufacturing research facility, the AMRF at the National Institute of Standard and Technology. We and some neighboring lab divisions used a lot of Sun Microsystems workstations, which leveraged Sun's NFS for sharing files across the enterprise. My colleagues and I did some ad hoc sharing of common software, particularly but not only early free software from GNU like Emacs and GCC. Wanting a way to institute that sharing in a way that was reliable, spanned various platforms (not just the Sun workstations, we had scatterings of Silicon Graphics Iris, some IBM Unix systems, and increasingly many PCs), and did not add unnecessary burdens to software installation and maintenance, I recognized that we could get all that using networked filesystems without requiring complicated procedures, and devised The Depot. I proposed an effort to iron out and institute this scheme with my fellow system admins and the scheme was used in several laboratories at NIST and other places for several years.

    The central group documented the Depot in the following paper, which I presented at the Fourth Annual Large Installation Systems Administration conference. This paper was subsequently included in Usenix SAGE Selected Papers in Network and System Administration.