Programming

I am using IRIX 5.3,
When I type "man" in a UNIX text console from any machine on my network, I want to pull out the man pages from the station where they have been installed.

Would anyone know the link?

Probably a dumb question on my part:

Do you mean that you want a "manual host"? Basically, a set of man pages for the entire network, that nayone can access, so that you don't have to add them to every machine?



Just to clarify,



loadc

yes that's exactly what I mean.

Could you help me with the link, I'm fairly new at this and I don't know where to start.

(there is no dumb question to me!)

thank you

Okay-


I'm back, and done with what distracted me, sorry...

Well, what I've done at home before is to basically share out, via NFS, teh directory with the man pages on it. This is usually /usr/share/man, or other similar area. keep in mind, many programs come with man pages that need to be put into the man page directories and you then need to re-catman them. this would need to be done for each piece of software, on the man-host, as you added it, if you wanted man pages, that is. The other issue arises if you are using more than one platform. If you have sun and SGI boxes and are trying to use the same man pages for both, you will get a lot of incorrect syntax and pages for non-existant commands.
Now, assuming you have all the same platform, and you have corralled all of the man pages into a given filesystem.directory on a given server, and you have mount points set on all of your otehr servers AND you have shared the directory with the man pages in it AAAANNNNDDD set the MANPATH var on all mounting systems to the mountpoint for the share, then you need to mount the directory on each server, (might want to add this to the (v)fstab, as a mount on boot)then you will want to run catman on the mounting machines to build the index (or updatedb on linux). This should allow you to do what you are wanting, should you desire to be really cool and lower your bandwidth use and make the systems a little more efficient, you could do all of the NFS stuff with automounter.
I believe that Neo had suggested using NFS, and this is how I would do this, I believe that an old solaris book I had went over something similar, back when sun actually advocated diskless workstations. I had to setup a boot server for Solaris 2.4 something or other, and part of that was network hosting the man pages on a given server and hosting the /usr on another and a /opt on another, etc. Basically because you had 250-500 Meg of disk on each box and you could do more with this setup than trying to get full systems on each box.
Hope this helped, good luck, post back anything else needed.



loadc