Re: [tlug] NFS-mounting /home

[Bruno Raoult <br@example.com>]

I agree with the "/home should be machine dependent, as opposed to user 
dependent" statement.

The problem in mounting /home is that it prevents you so setup a 
different way for special purposes:

1) The real need is to share users home dirs. /home is a superset of 
home dirs (not always as shown
     in next points), not *exacltly* the users home dirs.
2) If you need a local user  home dir somewhere for whatever reason, you 
will need to put it
    somewhere else in the tree, which is not "beautiful" [tm].
    Example: We have some critical machines which are used for market 
trading. Users home dirs
    are obviously not NFS-mounted, as we cannot afford to be dependant 
on NFS servers. But,
    at the same time, we want to have other users homes mounted. It 
means, in that particular case,
    that we have, at the same time, local and nfs-mounted user dirs in 
/home.
3) For performance reason, you would like to have home dirs on more than 
one server. In that case,
    you also cannot mount a "global" /home dir. Instead you will prefer 
a per-user system (for
    instance automount, with indirect maps, in /home/mount and links in 
/home).

etc...

In fact, mounting /home does not give you any freedom on setting-up 
specific needs. On contrary,
it is an assertion that "everybody has exactly the same needs", which, 
maybe, I could see in my
next life :-)

br.


Josh Glover wrote:

> 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
>
>

-- 
Unix is user friendly. He's just very picky about who his friends are...