Hi Michael,

Michael Hannon <[log in to unmask]> 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.