[lug] NFS-mounted home directories

[Charles Hutchinson]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 17:36 -0600, David L. Anselmi wrote:
> 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.
> 


Without knowing what the users need to do on each of the workstations it
does not really make sense to me why users would need more than the X
login form their primary workstation.  There have been VERY few times
when I have had to run the same graphical app on more than one machine
at the same time.  I use my main workstation for all graphical apps and
everything I do on any other machine is done from a terminal session or
two.  

The option I use for files I need to keep unique for each machine I do
with a configuration option like the following one out of my .profile.  

HISTFILE=$HOME/.bash_history.d/.sh_history.`hostname|cut -f1 -d'.'`

Not all applications can or can easily be configured like this but is
does fix the issue of sharing a single home directory for the places
where it can be used.

As a sysadmin this whole conversation is likely to cause me nightmares
just thinking about the logistics of the exponentially too complex
configuration.  In my eye no important data should ever be stored on a
workstation.  RAID and redundant everything does not completely
eliminate downtime and data loss but it is far and away more reliable
than any user facing/controlled workstation I have ever seen.  The
caveat being that you have a competent sysadmin that can build a stable
and maintainable server.  

Charlie