Re: location of home directories

[p.carsten@arcor.de]

Thank you Markus,

ok, the part of the skolelinux homedir structure that stuck out to me
was the hardcoded "skole" in it. 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.


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.

   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)


-- 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)
  
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)

Peter



> > I wondered why they are not under /home and have not found info/reasoning
> > for using tjener.intern:/skole/tjener/home0.
> >
> > Does anyone know by what standard this goes or have a pointer?
> >
> > skole.lan:/home as default, customizeable to
> > mydomain.de or mydomain.lan still seems more reasonable to me.
> 
> I think this may be some kind of skole-internal home-directories, so that
> it is possible to have more home directories on different server
> distributions (althought I have no idea why this may be needed).
> 
> A scheme like /home/<server>/<uid> or /<server>/home/<uid> would be good
> if you have a lot of users who may have their home directories distributed
> over different servers (maybe a server for students, and one for teachers,
> or one server for each department?). If you use /home/ you may have
> problems to mount the different home directories into the same directory
> so that it is possible to access all homedirs on each server.
> 
> best regards, Markus
>