Re: no home-directory on diskless workstations

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[George]
> Unfortunatley I cant try to make a manual mount from the diskless
> workstation because I cant gain root access. I can ping the nfs-server
> though. (10.0.2.10)

To gain root access, you need to set a root password in the LTSP chroot.
Use 'ltsp-chroot passwd root' as root on the LTSP server to do this.

> I hope my description is clear enough. This problem is starting to
> wear on my nerves.. Hoping someone can help.  Noone using san or nas
> for homedirs on debian-edu? If so, how have you set it up?

I suspect you are trying the wrong approach.  Can you make sure to
update the manual with information on how to do this when you have
tested and managed to get it to work?  It seem like something that
should be documented.

I'll try to give you a pointer in what I believe is the right approach.

You need to change the automount setup in LDAP to make sure it is used
on diskless workstations (everyone except tjener).  The LDAP objects
used by the automount service can be seen in /etc/ldap/autofs.ldif.

To modify LDAP, you can use ldapvi.  To browse LDAP, I recommend
jexplorer.

To mount from a new host (the NAS), you need to create a new automount
LDAP object for this host.  If this host is called nas.intern, you need
to add a LDAP object like the one already present for tjener.  This is
untested:

  ## the /skole/nas submount
  dn: cn=nas,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
  objectClass: automount
  cn: nas
  automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no

  dn: ou=auto.nas,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
  objectClass: top
  objectClass: automountMap
  ou: auto.nas

Next, you need to add a object for the subdirectories exported from
nas.intern.  This is a 'generic' object, matching anything exported.
You can also add specific ones if you want to use different mount
options for some mount points:

  dn: cn=/,ou=auto.nas,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
  objectClass: automount
  cn: /
  automountInformation: -fstype=nfs4,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid nas.intern:/&

The & string is replaced by the mount point name.

With this in place, the automatic mounting will happen when you chdir
info /tjener/nas/home_edu/ or try to read a file from this location.

Next, you need to make sure the users home directories are set to be
located under /tjener/nas/home_edu/ by modifying their LDAP objects (and
you should also modify the user creation process (aka the GOSA user
templates) to make sure the new users get the correct home directory.

I might be an idea to change the exported name from home_edu to home0,
to prepare for more home directories in the future.
-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen