[lug] NFS-mounted home directories

[Jeff Schroeder]

Vince:

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

This is definitely something to consider.  Some programs use lock files 
to prevent data corruption.  X11 is an example; I've also seen it in 
Google Chrome, KMail and Akregator (mail and RSS reader in KDE).

I suspect entire window managers like KDE and Gnome also use locks and 
sockets to maintain state and configuration settings; I can imagine 
when you make changes to your personal configuration (say, your desktop 
wallpaper) it might be written to a file when you logout of the window 
manager but before then it's stored in RAM.  So if I change my 
wallpaper on Machine A and then slide over to Machine B I won't see the 
change.  And if I logout of A it'll write the change, but then when I 
logout of B later it will be undone because B didn't know I changed the 
wallpaper.  (This is just a guess, but hopefully you see what I mean.)

I personally use NFS mounts of /home for all of the computers in my 
house-- each family member has their own account, so no matter which 
computer they're using they have the same environment.  It's definitely 
awesome.  But I've seen problems logging into the same account from 
multiple machines simultaneously, so you should definitely be cautious 
of it (and perhaps encourage your users to logout of A before logging 
into B).

As an added note, I agree with other comments that cross-mounting dozens 
of /home/username directories is fraught with peril.  It would be much 
better to have a single master server with all of /home.  
Administration, backup, management, and troubleshooting would be SO 
much more efficient.

$0.02,
Jeff