[lug] NFS-mounted home directories

[Davide Del Vento]

>> 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.

I'm not worried about running simultaneously. I'm worried about
running different versions of the same GUI app at different times. In
my experience this often creates problems. In some cases it created so
many problems for me that now I don't upgrade machines anymore, but I
only do clean installs using a different filesystem for new home and
mount the old home to retrieve the data.
And here we are talking of something even worst: continuously
switching back and forth among different versions. I would not ever do
that, but of course is not "forbidden" and for certain apps might even
work just fine.

>> 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.

Well, if every home is local to a single machine, and not mounted
anywhere else it is less likely for the password to be compromised,
even by a friendly user.

> BTW, isn't auth/ set to 700,
Correct.

> which mitigates the file permissions somewhat?
Not at all, IMHO, because the directories contained in auth have
trivial and known names (e.g. svn.simple). And all those directories
are word readable.

Have a nice weekend,
Dav