I set up a small network without any bells and whistles, and I'm going in and out of the different machines using ssh. My $HOME directories on each machine is different, and I wanted to have just one home directory.

Any helpful suggestions? NFS is the way to go, yes? I have ensured that the usernames on all machines are the same.

So, I reckon, just set up NFS to share main machines $HOME with the other machines, and on each of the other machines symlink it $HOME directory to main machine.

The disadvantage is that if the main machine is not on, the system brakes down of course, but a little script will be able to check for that.

Any further suggestions? Many thanks in advance.

I'd suggest creating a directory under $HOME, and sharing this. Your home folder contains many config files (in hidden directories) which will need to be available if the filesystem is not mounted, and the settings in these may need to be different for different installs.

Look into autofs - it will only mount the relevant home directory when it's required.

thanks guys!!

You could run into a problem if you are logged into more than one machine at once using the same desktop environment because two instances may try to update the same configuration file. If the server may not be running, then be sure to use the `user' & `_netdev' mount options in /etc/fstab. This will prevent a boot failure due to the server being down. With the `user' option, you can mount it as a regular user.