tlug: NFS question

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

I have what I somehow feel is one of those stupid questions that
will fill all and sundry with a warm glow of satisfaction.  It's
connected, again, with work on these student terminals that I
hope to set up next year.

The design strategy (someone step on my fingers if I'm crawling
in the wrong direction...) is to load processing overhead onto
the terminals, and to centralize data storage and machine
configuration details on the server.  The terminal machines will
run Applix and Netscape and what have you, from the disk in each
terminal.  Data, mail, and bootpd parameters will be stored on
the server.

This will require that the user's home directory be in an NFS or
other remote-mounted filesystem, and I just realized that I don't
know how best to set this up, nor indeed whether it will work at
all.

Am I going to run into massive overhead by exporting /home to
every terminal (there will be about 20 at the start, but numbers
will grow; and there will be 300+ subdirectories in /home)?  Will
this require that the /etc/password on the server is cloned to
the client to assure that permissions are synced between the two
systems?  Are permissions on an NFS-mounted filesystem going to
be as easy to walk around as, thinking idly about the problem
here at my desk this evening, I think they will be --- by hacking
the /etc/passwd ID number or password on the client machine?  It
all seems rather scary somehow.

Or is there another, better method of accessing remote data in
filesystem form that I can apply here?

If the answers are complex, please feel free to just point me at
suitable readings.  I'm happy to study, but don't want to spend
my time reading up on dead-ends.

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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