[tlug] NFS-mounting /home

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

I am in the midst of a heated discussion with one of the other sysadmins 
about our practise of NFS-mounting /home on our Unix boxen. Each user 
has a homespace on our A1000 (Sun hardware RAID box). Said homespaces 
are exported by NFS on one of the Solaris servers, and then mounted as 
/home everywhere else. This allows Joe User to login to any Unix box on 
the network and have the same environment.

I think this is A Good Thing (tm). In fact, in my limited experience, it 
appears that this is a fairly standard practise in Unix networks. I know 
two smart sysadmins that do it that way, and they are both Chris Sekiya 
BOFH types who wouldn't do something that sucked just because they read 
about it on linux.com.

The other sysadmin disagrees, claiming that /home should be machine 
dependent, as opposed to user dependent.

Am I right? (And we are talking about the theory here, so please do not 
tell me that I should be using AFS as opposed to NFS--I *know* that!) 
Furthermore, does anyone know of a good doc that I could point this guy 
at? I seem to not be convincing in my explanation of why I have things 
set up this way.

Thanks!
-Josh