Re: Mounting workstation /home on laptop
On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 23:35, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> Hello world!
>
> I had this idea the other day. My parents have a network I made for
> them, and currently, it is a router running floppyfw, a workstation
> running Woody and a laptop running Woody.
>
> So, I figured, if the laptop is in use at home, which it is most of the
> time, behind this firewall, in this network, and the workstation is on
> too, it would be convenient for them if their home dir was simply the
> home dir that they have on the workstation.
>
> If, for some reason, the home dir on the workstation is unavailable,
> then it should fall back to the local disk on the laptop.
>
> Is this something people here are doing? How? I thought about NFS, some
> automounting, stuff like that, perhaps mounting both local and remote
> filesystems as something other than /home/, and then use a script to
> maintain symbolic links. But since all I've used NFS for before is as a
> backend to SFS, I really don't know much about NFS' capabilites.
>
It sounds like NFS is what you want. Take note though that it has a very
long (minutes) hang time if it can't find the remote system when you
want to unmount (it fails quite quickly if you try to mount a remote
directory and the remote computer isn't found though).
Also depending on the disk traffic, it can be heavy on network traffic.
I would suggest using a script in /etc/rc2.d (use a link to
/etc/init.d/) that tries to ping the remote computer and act on the
result (don't know if ping has a quite mode but you can always grep the
output).
Depending on whether they save files localy, it may be better to mount
the remote home under a different directory, probably a subdirectory
under /home that they can access, otherwise the local files will be
hidden. The only advantage to mount the remote /home instead of the
local one is to use the remote settings.
In such a case I would also sugest mirroring the two home directories at
least at mount time and depending on how much they save stuff to disk,
maybe more.
> Any suggestions?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kjetil
> --
> Kjetil Kjernsmo
> Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer
> kjetil@kjernsmo.net webmaster@skepsis.no editor@learn-orienteering.org
> Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/
--
Micha Feigin
michf@math.tau.ac.il
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