Editing Advanced Installation (section)

==RSFROOT for NFS-shared user home directories==
Heterogeneous networks with user home directories shared through [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System_(protocol) NFS] are quite common in many institutions. In addition, even when the architecture is the same (i.e. 64-bit) and the operating system is the same (i.e. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RHEL RHEL]), the difference between operating system versions may be very significant because clusters may run legacy versions, while desktop workstations may run the latest-and-greatest (even beta), and entirely different Madagascar versions may be needed to support both. 

One possible solution of detecting the distribution version and architecture and setting RSFROOT appropriately is shown below. In the example network, all RHEL4 machines have the same architecture, but there are RHEL 3 machines with several architectures:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
REDHAT_RELEASE=`awk -F'release' '{ print $2 }' /etc/redhat-release | awk -F' ' '{ print $1 }'`

RSFROOT=/usr/local/rsf/rhel$REDHAT_RELEASE

if [ $REDHAT_RELEASE == '4' ] ; then
    export RSFROOT
elif [ $REDHAT_RELEASE == '3' ] ; then
    export RSFROOT=$RSFROOT/$ARCH
fi
</syntaxhighlight>
Of course, the Madagascar administrator will have to download appropriate versions of Madagascar to each $RSFROOT, and compile them on the appropriate system.

If you have many kinds of systems to maintain, with multiple versions of Madagascar, and users have more than one shell, you may find it easy to outsource the complex logic to the easy-to-debug Python, i.e.:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
export RSFROOT=`$M8R_SETUP/get_rsfroot.py`
export PYTHONPATH=`$M8R_SETUP/edit_pythonpath.py`
export PATH=`$M8R_SETUP/edit_path.py`
</syntaxhighlight>

and similarly for (t)csh. The Python scripts determine the operating system and its version, determine the machine name, and simply print to stdout the desired string.