[lug] NFS-mounted home directories

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi,

> 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.

Of course that depends on your cluster: how many machines, how many
users, how much workload, how reliable network, etc. Our sysadmin have
addressed most of the performance hit that we had, but every once in a
while it still occur and for the users it's not fun. YMMV and your
user expectation might be different too (maybe nobody cares about
accessing your machines on Thanksgiving, unlike ours). David Anselmi
might give you numbers more relevant to what you will do. Here are
mine: our homes are GPFS, we have about 100 machines (hitting just a
few fileservers), with a few thousand of heavy users.

> 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.

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! Try a:

ls -l ~/.subversion/auth/svn.simple/xxxxxxxx
and then cat the same file.

Bye,
Dav