best way to share user data in a computer centre?

[Mike Kallies]

Matt Price wrote:
> Hi,
> 
...
> -how horrible would it be, in terms of performance, to put /home on a
> networked disk?
> -how would i combine this with user authentication (googling around I
> guess OpenLDAP & NIS are the two most common solutions, can someone
> give me advice as to which is the simplest and easiest to maintain?
> I'm not looking for tons of flexibility, just something that will
> mostly work when I'm not around)
> 
> As always I appreciate the help!
> matt

This sounds like it can be done very old-school.

Export /home as NFS on one machine, then have every other machine mount
/home as an NFS share.  Since the users don't have root access on any of
the systems, there's no risk of them accidentally circumventing the NFS
and Unix permissions.  But if somebody drops a notebook on the network
and impersonates one of the clients, they'd have full access to the files.

100Mbps Ethernet for the home directory should be unnnoticible for most
tasks, but I wouldn't recommend it for multimedia.  Youtube clips and
playing MP3s will hiccup, probably, high res digital photos would be
okay... but there would be lag.  Disk activity on the server machine
would be higher than the others.

The nice part about NFS is how robust it is for applications.  Even if
you reboot the server, most apps will just sit and hang waiting for the
filesystem to respond... when the export re-appears on the network, it
will carry on like nothing happened.

Hopefully they won't be rebooting boxes though :-)

Note that because NFS uses UID and GID, you'll need to ensure
consistency of those values in the /etc/passwd files among the machines.

-Mike
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