[lug] NFS-mounted home directories

[Vince Dean]

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm taking over responsibility for a
small cluster of Linux desktops and servers. One feature of this cluster
is that each user's home directory exists on a single machine and is
exported to all the others by NFS. This arrangement has caused some
concern, especially among the administrators.

There are clearly some benefits in giving a user the same environment on
every machine.

There also is an obvious risk: if the machine hosting a home directory
goes down, the user loses access his home directory on all the machines.
So far, we've chosen to accept that risk. But I'm concerned about less
obvious problems.

Davide Del Vento has pointed out that there may be a big performance hit
because there will be so many NFS requests for /home, but David Anselmi
has not seen performance problems in his setting.

Also, I wonder whether there are files in a home directory which should
not be shared between multiple sessions on multiple machines? I'm
thinking in particular of the .Xauthority file. It's quite possible that
a user will have simultaneous logins on several machines and all those
sessions will share the same .Xauthority file. Will this cause problems?

I know that it is not unusual to mount home directories via NFS, so I'm
sure this question has come up before.

I'd be grateful for comments about the .Xauthority file, or any other
problems we might encounter when mounting home directories via NFS.

Regards,
Vince