How To Create /home on a Network Drive

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 01:39 -0500, Anthony Messina wrote:
> On Saturday 09 May 2009 10:30:37 pm Robert L Cochran wrote:
> > >> I have two Fedora laptops. I would like to have my /home partition as a
> > >> separate partition on a network drive, such that when each laptop user
> > >> logs in, his or her /home/[user] directory is mounted from the network
> > >> drive. But I don't know how to do this. Suggestions?
> > >>      
> > >
> > > ----
> > > might not be a good idea if the laptop is detached from the network
> > > but...
> > >
> > > man nfs
> > >
> > > man auto.home
> > > man auto.master
> > >
> > > I know that Red Hat Enterprise documentation covers this pretty well and
> > > there might be some documentation on Fedora Wiki but I haven't looked.
> > >
> > > Craig
> > >    
> >
> > I think my brain must have shut down for the night. I wouldn't have such
> > an easy time mounting /home in a restaurant, would I?
> >
> > Thanks...
> 
> no, you're right about that, but i was thinking about this yesterday too.  how 
> does one use their linux laptop like some of the coporate folks use their 
> windows laptops?  when they're at the office, they use the profile on the 
> server; when they're away, they use the "roaming" copy of the profile.
> 
> does such a thing exist for us?  i got to thinking about some crazy rsync 
> script that would run just before disconnecting and right after reconnecting 
> to the "home" network, but that's a kludge.
> 
> anyone doing something like the linux road warrior?
----
well, not really but in anticipation of that and also to support the
various storage facilities I typically do this...

On the Main NFS server I have local hard drives which provide the
basic / file system. For storage, I typically mount /home/storage from
whatever (SAS, iSCSI, etc.) and this main server is also my main LDAP
server. LDAP users (which is just about everybody) are mounted
at /home/storage/users and the main file shares are
in /home/storage/files which are automounted via LDAP automounts. The
only users who have homes in /home are local user accounts which are
very few and only created for specific applications or daemons.

Thus on the laptop of some roaming user, I could have a local user with
the same uid and as his LDAP posix account but his home directory still
in /home which would still 'automount' the above users and files and
thus an rsync is certainly possible.

I suppose it's possible to have a generated, pre-shared ssh key so a
user could sync his local /home from his laptop to his $HOME directory
on the main NFS server but I tend to specifically not allow normal users
to ssh into servers for security reasons.

Craig


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