best way to share user data in a computer centre?

[Christopher Browne]

I wish that distributed filesystems like Coda (which later got redone as
InterMezzo, then toasted by MSR) had progressed, as we might have something
decent by now.

Sharing options suck fairly badly.  NFS seems about the most workable
option.

I wish I could suggest more alternatives.

9p from Plan 9 seems widely implemented, but making it work seems
problematic.

CFS let's you do Microsoft-centric filesystem sharing, seeming rather
hateful.

I'm not sure Coda still works...  it was interesting.

AFS is way too complex for the scenario described.

I'd be keen on hearing of plausible alternatives.

On May 15, 2010 8:34 AM, "Matt Price" <moptop99-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

Hi,

I've just had the pleasure of building a computer centre for and with
the tenants of a social housing building in Kensington Market
(everything's working but the internet -- thanks for the help
Rafael!).  What I have are 5 machines, sturdy but perhaps somewhat
plodding by today's standards, currently all running bog-standard
isntalls of Ubuntu Lucid.  Currently the machines are completely
independent of one another, and I had initially thought I would just
maintain one admin account and one guest account on each machine; but
as I watch the users work, I think more and more that they will want
to be able to access their own files from any machine -- most of these
folks do not have computers of their own, so it doesn't make all that
much sense to ask them to save their work on a usb drive or whatever.

Something I really don't want to have to do is to run ltsp in the
cluster -- i've tried setting up LTSP before and at the time it seemed
like there were tons of headaches.  Also I want the tenants to be able
to more or less administer the computer centre on their own, and I
don't feel I understand ltsp well enough to teach it to them.  So I'm
wondering if other people use simpler solutinos for similar problems?
For instance,

-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
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