stevemayes, this is precisely what I was thinking. Since, user installed software, by default, ends up in /usr/local, esp. when using Gnu make and Autoconf, I thought I could just tarball /usr/local and copy it over to the other machines. For subsequent updates, as noted in another reply, I could rsync any updates from the "mommy" machine. In fact, as far as I can see, /usr/local/ ends up getting its own etc, include, lib, var and so on, mirroring the tree under /. My only worry about CPU architecture, (dual core Xeon vs. quad core Xeon), but that seems to be not a problem... after all, I routinely copy regular applications between machines... the only hitch is that one can't exchange applications between PowerPC and Intel.

Perhaps threaded perl might be affected on multicore machines, but that is an area I know nothing about. And, I guess, if I have to ask, I should stay out of that mess completely anyway.

I will go ahead with the above strategy... I will download and compile everything on one server, and when everything is working there, I will tarball/gzip the entire /usr/local/ directory and copy it over to the other machines and test there. If everything works, I am good.

Many thanks all.

--

when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

In reply to Re^2: installing Perl (and other software) on multiple identical machines by punkish
in thread installing Perl (and other software) on multiple identical machines by punkish

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.