[PLUG] NFS mounted home directories

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Wed Oct 10 00:08:22 UTC 2007


# from Russell Senior
# on Tuesday 09 October 2007 15:43:

>I am wanting to set up nfs mounted home directories for a bunch of
>boxes on my network.  I'd like to ask folks-in-the-know where the
>gotchas are likely to be.  The goal being that it won't matter where
>one sits down, they'll be able to login and have their homedir right
>there.

I just ssh -X into the other machine.

I have been thinking about normalizing the dotfiles across multiple 
machines, which probably has a lot of overlap with the nfs issue, 
except that it is a series of independent, maybe offline, and 
potentially conflicting changes.  I'm leaning toward something 
involving svn or svk (because one machine is a laptop) and per-machine 
settings can be pretty significant (because one machine has three 
monitors to which the kde desktop config is tuned, while the other is a 
laptop and the rest are servers.)  Maybe my answer ultimately involves 
cfengine (but that seems more tuned toward managing /etc than /home.)

Anyway, some thoughts:

caches and tempfiles:
  should be per-machine, but are often found in ~/ (bind mount or 
symlink to a local dir?)

bookmarks, configs, and etc:
  lock/overwrite issues, (vs merging?) -- without even getting into the 
issue of race conditions, depends on whether the app notices on-disk 
changes and/or overwrites with in-memory data

per-machine settings:
  most config files have some sort of include mechanism (e.g. .bashrc,
.vimrc), so it's mostly a matter of defining a per-machine config 
repository and putting a standard include statement in the shared files

The freedesktop.org seems to have put a lot of thought into this sort of 
thing, though they maybe haven't made great headway on the older apps.

--Eric
-- 
So malloc calls a timeout and starts rummaging around the free chain,
sorting things out, and merging adjacent small free blocks into larger
blocks. This takes 3 1/2 days.
--Joel Spolsky
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