On Fri, 17 Jun 2016, briand@aracnet.com wrote:
I have my nfs shares set-up to automount to /home/nfs4/<username> and then that directory name is used in the /etc/passwd file.What i'd like to do is have it use /home/<username> in the event it can't see the nfs server.it seems like some automount trickery might be possible if, for example, nfs mount didn't work it would actually mount /home/<username> on /home/nfs4/<username>.Haven't found a way to do this, probably because it's a horrible hack, or not possible and I should probably be trying to do this some other way.Any suggestions ?
I'm not an NFS expert, but I've been using/sys admin'g NIS/NFS on various Sun and Linux systems at home and at work since the late '90s. I have never heard of what you're trying to do, but can't categorically say that it isn't possible (if the double negative isn't too confusing). I don't think the result would be very satisfactory as it seems you'd end up with a split home directory with files in both the local and server home directories. I think it would be pretty chaotic.
My experience over the years is the NFS automouting is very reliable and fairly easy to administer. If your network is stable, then you shouldn't have a problem with it at all. If your network isn't stable, then that problem should be fixed. I've had software development systems consisting of approx. 100 client workstations automouting user home directories from a couple of Linux servers (almost always Debian, but some Redhat and SUSE - doesn't really matter) with 30 - 40 heavy users. It was very reliable and there were almost never any problems.