Rainer Krienke <krienke@uni-koblenz.de> said:
[...]
> At our site we store all user (~4000 users) data centrally on several NFS
> servers (running solaris up to now). In order to ease administration we
> chose the approach to mount each user directory direcly (via automount
> configured by NIS) on a NFS client where the user wants to access his
> data. The most important effect of this is, that each users directory is
> always reachable under the path /home/<user>. This proofed to be very
> useful (from the administrators point of view) when moving users from one
> server to another, installing additionl NFS servers etc, because the only
> path the user knows about and sees when e.g. issuing pwd is
> /home/<user>. The second advantage is, that there is no need to touch the
> client system: No need for NFS mounts in /etc/fstab to mount the servers
> export directory and so there are no unneeded dependencies frpm any
> client to the NFS servers.
This is exactly what we do with our (much more modest) 600 accounts at the
Departamento de Informatica of the UTFSM (Valparaiso, Chile).
> Now think of a setup where no user directory mounts are configured but
> the whole directory of a NFS server with many users is exported. Of
> course this makes things easyer for the NFS-system since only one mount
> is needed but on the client you need to create link trees or something
> similar so the user still can access his home under /home/<user> and not
> something like /home/server1/<user>. Moreover even if you create link
> trees when you issue commands like pwd you see the real path (eg
> /server1/<user>) instead of the logical (/home/<user>). Such paths are
> soon written into scripts etc, so that if the user is moved sometime
> later things will be broken.
> You simply loose a layer of abstraction if you do not mount the users dir
> directly. The only other solution I know of would be amd. Amd automatically
> places a link. But since we come from the sun world, we simply uses suns
> automounter and there were no problems up to now.
The SunOS automounter (which we used before Solaris) did this too. It was a
pain in the neck, as the "real" path to the home does show through, and you
get the same problems with scripts &c containing physical, not logical,
paths to files. Fixing the _users_ is much harder than fixing up the
configurations...
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 23 2002 - 21:00:29 EST