"Roaming profiles" style system... suggestions?

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Mon Feb 14 16:18:25 UTC 2005


On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 12:55:18AM -0500, Madison Kelly wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   I am trying to set up my first all-Linux network. Until now most of 
> my networks have been based on MS clients or, more often, networks where 
> "normal" communication was using web-based front ends.
> 
>   As it stands I am currently planning to have the server connect to 
> each client at night using 'rsync' and copying any deltas over to the 
> server before running a backup. What I would really like to do though is 
> have a setup similar to MS' "roaming profiles" like I used to use over 
> Samba. I know that I could use an NFS share as the user's home directory 
> which is mounted at boot. That though would limit the system to one user 
>  to a given machine.

Nothing prevents you from having a central file server that uses NFS to
serve /home to all other machines.  I have done so in the past and it
works great, and the user can log in to any machine and have their files
and setup.  This is NOT like samba/windows shares which are mounted per
user, NFS is mounted for all users.  The requirement for NFS being that
the uid/usernames MUST match across all machines, unless you want to use
a name mapping process.  Some people use NIS or LDAP to maintain one
password server too, so that when the user changes their password, it
takes effect for all machines automatically (since they all use the
password server to authenticate the user).

>   Is there a way (google hasn't helped yet) to have a script run when a 
> user enters their name and password? This way, I hope, I could write a 
> script that would not mount anything off NFS until the user logs in and 
> then mount the appropriate NFS share when the user validates him or 
> herself.

That would be silly.  Mounting /home at boot would take care of any user
that connects.

>   Is there any how-tos or other helpful information someone could point 
> me to? It would be a real help! Thank you!

Lennart Sorensen
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