Application accounts

For each of the products that are installed and deployed within my company, there is an application account to go with it. The account will have a shared home directory, /home/username, and a per-host application installation directory, /apps/username.

The application installation directory is managed by the product's install program. The only contents should be from the installation and from the application. Users should not "move" files aside, or copy files to that directory. This is the production installation directory, not a work-area.

The home directory is to house builds, distributions, patch files, other "cruft", depending on the host. Release builds are stored under the "releng" directory by release number, for example "~/releng/1.2". QA builds are stored under the "qa" directory in the same fashion, or as the QA engineer chooses. Distributions are stored in the home directory in sub-directories starting with "v" and the release number, e.g. "~/v1.2". The install program, always found in "sbin" in the source repository, is copied reach release (since there may be changes for that release) to the distribution directory (on the destination server).

Generally builds are performed in the engineering environment and no build tools are available in the production environment. Because of co-location, the engineering environments and QA environments share home directories and the production environment is isolated. Many of the products are installed and deployed on multiple hosts, within each environment. Therefore, it is important to have a shared resource (the home directory) in each environment to be able to install distributions or patches from.

Release numbers are just symbolic names, they could be anything - conventionally they are dotted numeral sets that match tags in the source repository (e.g. "1.4.6.1"). But a release number could be "1.2-test0012" for a QA release. This may correspond to the "1.2" source tag.