"Roaming profiles" style system... suggestions?

[Tim Writer]

lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org (Lennart Sorensen) writes:

> 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.

I agree with all of Lennart's advice except this.  Mounting /home at boot
makes your network much more unstable in the event of problems with your NFS
server.  If you only have a few clients, it's not much of an issue but if you
have many clients it can be a huge problem.  Use either an automounter or a
script run as root by [xkg]dm to mount the user's home on demand.

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
647.722.5301                                      toronto, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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