best way to share user data in a computer centre?

[Matt Price]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Jamon Camisso
<jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 05/17/2010 11:10 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 11:45:58AM -0400, Jamon Camisso wrote:
>>> On 05/15/2010 09:07 AM, Mike Kallies wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Sounds like NIS is the perfect candidate since that's what it is
>>> designed for :) Also, since the machines on the network are largely
>>> isolated from the outside by way of NAT, securing the directory
>>> shouldn't be much work at all.
>>
>> NIS is also compeltely awful.
>>
>> LDAP is much more robust, but also much harder to setup.  NIS is just
>> not worth it though.  I would rather setup cron jobs to rsync password
>> files around than deal with NIS ever again (which was in fact what I
>> did the last time I had to deal with NIS problems).
>>
>> LDAP is the modern and supported way to do it.  NIS is just a bad joke
>> on the part of SUN (to go along with portmap and NFS).  They are all
>> awful.  Unfortunately we don't seem to have any good replacements for
>> NFS yet, but we certainly have better choices than NIS.
>
> For what Matt has described, NFS+NIS is simple, and will work. I agree
> that LDAP would be better, but it doesn't sound like there's much time
> to spend setting things up.

the main issue is not that there are strict time limits -- though i'm
behind on am illion hings right now so yes, the les time spent the
better- - but that i want it to be relatively easy for non-experts to
undestand and, eventually, maintain.  that my be asking too much,
really, even with NIS.

The other option is to tap into the already-existing Active Directory
that is used at this site for the staff computers -- but i'm not sure
that's desirable, and they may not want us hving access anyway.  Also
i've never worked with that stuff and i'm not at all sure how you
integrate with AD more or less seamlessly.

>
> Also, NFS works for pushing directories and data around on a home
> network, and on commercially supported 10GbE NAS units from major
> vendors. What's the issue with it?

lennart's criticisms of nfs don't really impact me here, though i can
see their importance.

thanks gain y'all.

matt
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