best way to share user data in a computer centre?

[Ken Burtch]

Disclaimer: I've only skimmed through this thread and have not read it
thoroughly.

Sharing /home may be problematic since the directory may contain files
particular to a machine (for example, socket files for some
applications).  So I would not try sharing all of /home.

If you want to share a subdirectory of /home, I would concur with Mr.
Browne that NFS is the most obvious approach...provided you understand
the problems of NFS (for example, if your NFS server machine fails, it
is a single point of failure that takes out all the computers.  This is
one of the reasons people don't use NFS on servers.)

Last I checked, Coda was still marked as "not ready for serious use".

Another possibility, as your number of machines is small, is to share
one or more subdirectories of /home using sshfs.  I described setting
that up in my article on VirtualBox
(http://www.pegasoft.ca/coder/coder_october_2009.html).

If the odds of the users switching between different computers on the
same day is low, you might want to simply do a nightly cron file copy
with rsync or unison.

Ken B.

On Sun, 2010-05-16 at 14:03 -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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
> > --
> > The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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-- 
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Ken O. Burtch                                       Phone: 905-562-0848
  "Linux Shell Scripting with Bash"              Email: ken-8VyUGRzHQ8IsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
                                 Blog: http://www.pegasoft.ca/coder.html
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