Re: location of home directories
p.carsten@arcor.de wrote:
Thank you Markus,
ok, the part of the skolelinux homedir structure that stuck out to me
was the hardcoded "skole" in it.
Yes, i think this is something that isn't really needed, but whoever
had done this must have some thoughts behind that ;)
I think skolelinux is already of good
use also for non school projects. And a common scheme say at least
within Custom Debian Distributions may be desireable.
A scheme like
tjener.skole.lan:/home/tjener/home0
would make it more general and eliminate the need for
customizations other than changing hostname and domain.
Yes, that would be good.
Things I am not yet clear about, and would like to know your thoughs on:
-- AFAIK It is currently not possible to do additional mounts to the same
mountpoint. So "mount tjener:/home /home" and a subsequent
"mount tjener2:/home /home" would only show /home/tjener2/home0 anyway.
Yes, that's correct.
This means the mounting client machine needs to explicitly mount
particular servers to a deeper mountpoint anyway. So the /hostname/
part in the directory on the server does not help in keeping mounting
volumes from different servers on clients unified.
This kind of global namespace mounting is only supported in AFS (AFAIK)
Yes, on servers which need to have all we do the following:
mount fs01:/home/fs01 /home/fs01
mount fs02:/home/fs02 /home/fs02
And on computers that only need some of the directories (e.g. the one
of the currently logged in user) we do the following:
mount fs??:/home/fs??/markus.schabel /home/fs??/markus.schabel
(replace ?? with the number of the server the homedirectory of the
user is physically located)
-- I am not sure why to keep different home[0,1,..] volumes around when
the servers make use of LVM which allows adding additional volumes
transparently later on. (Distinguishing /home/student and
/home/teacher might be another thing)
AFAIK it is not possible to use LVM accross different servers. If you
have a school with some departments (e.g. electronics, information
technology, ...) and each department has it's own fileserver for the
student's homedirectories you cannot use LVM but must mount the
individual home directories of the servers onto one central place (if
you need them all at one place, e.g. only one external available ftp
server).
So IMHO at the moment, it might as well be just tjener.skole.lan:/home
(or translated into a particular network environment more like:
server.city-highschool.lan:/home)
Splitting data across servers may help you a bit if you got one machine
down, you can use the backup on another server, just add another local
directory inside /home and change the nfs mounts.
Markus
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