This document describes issues to be aware of, when administering an autoinstalled machine. Reading through this first, might be a good idea. Autoinstall likes to treat the following files magically: /etc/dfs/dfstab /etc/dfs/fstypes /etc/exports /etc/fstab /etc/group /etc/inetd.conf /etc/inittab /etc/netmasks /etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/passwd /etc/profile /etc/shadow /etc/svc.conf /etc/sysconfigtab /etc/system /etc/vfstab /etc/.login /etc/XF86Config /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root /var/spool/cron/root The following files are also treated specially, though by a different mechanism: sendmail.cf If a machine is autoinstalled, and modifications are later made to one of these files without also mentioning that modification to dcs@uci.edu (so that someone can change the autoinstall script to re-add your changes), and then run-after is used on the machine, then those modifications will be lost. Running run-after periodically, eases keeping a machine up-to-date on bug and security fixes, and sometimes brings in new, useful functionality that wasn't brought in at the time of the initial install. Copious examples are listed in the autoinstall web doc. For more information, see How autoinstall handles the magic files We also request that you carefully avoid making changes to the system partitions whereever possible. It is almost always more effective to make changes to an external disk; in particular, applications really don't belong on the system disk. Most applications can at least be put on an external disk, with a couple of small changes to the system disk (which are recorded by DCS in autoinstall), like a inetd.conf entry or an rc script in rc3.d. Careful adherence to this simple rule can save huge amounts of time when an upgrade becomes necessary.