[lug] NFS-mounted home directories

David L. Anselmi anselmi at anselmi.us
Fri Jun 18 17:36:42 MDT 2010


Davide Del Vento wrote:
>> Also, I wonder whether there are files in a home directory which should
>> not be shared between multiple sessions on multiple machines?
>
> I would be worried about everything, unless the machines are
> homogeneous and in sync, in which case I wouldn't. For example:
> different versions of firefox, openoffice or any other program that
> writes its own configuration in ~? Some of them might play nicely with
> older/newer releases, but I'm sure some will not.

In my environment we don't usually run desktops or GUI apps on multiple machines simultaneously. 
Those run on the machine you're sitting at and logins to other machines are usually just command-line.

When I have run two desktops at the same time it's been for simple things--one session just runs a 
terminal emulator.  Firefox won't run on the second machine due to its lock file.

> It's a completely different story, but with a shared home I would be
> also worried about .subversion, because by default it stores
> repositories' password in plain text in a world-readable file!
 >
> ls -l ~/.subversion/auth/svn.simple/xxxxxxxx
> and then cat the same file.

That's a bad idea but it has nothing to do with shared home directories.

BTW, isn't auth/ set to 700, which mitigates the file permissions somewhat?

Dave



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