moving user accounts to an NFS server
 

Hello
Box A allows users 1, 2 and 3 access. Users 1, 2 and 3 also have access on Box B. They have seperate accounts on each box. The boxes are on two different sites. I would like to move the user accounts to Box C so that users 1,2 and 3 can acces their /home from A or B using NFS. There are more than thirty users of these two boxes - and they change sites all the time. How can I tranfer the accounts to Box C so that they can log on from A or B and nothing is saved locally?
Thanks
PS I've tried "moving" the /home/user files but that didin't work - even when /home was mounted via NFS.

esteeven,

What problems did you have when you "moved" the files? If it was permission problems, you need to make sure that the UID numbers are synced between the two machines. This is done via /etc/passwd (basically). Also, remember that NFS "squashes" the root user, usually to the nobody user (look at the no_root_squash option in exports(5). You may look into the NSS (Name Switching Service) facility allow this to work dynamically over the network (via NIS or LDAP).

The boxes are on two different sites.
NFS doesn't like high latency (or slow) links. Will it be fast enough? How often do users switch sites? Perhaps doing a nightly rsync would work out (or an rsync on login.) AFAIK, there is no "distributed" NFS solution (and if there is, I would like to hear about it.)

Good Luck,
chris

Hi bastard23
Perhaps NFS is not the solution? Back to the drawing board!!!

esteeven,

You may want to look at Coda, InterMezzo or OpenAFS. I briefly looked at them, but that was a while ago. I'm not sure what the status on the projects are. IIRC, they all have a decent caching system which would help with the high latency links. No idea if they would be stable for you. They also require a bit more effort than NFS (mainly because NFS is already integrated into most OSs). There will be gotchas with any network file system, mainly because they fail differently than local file systems.

The performance would probably be determined by how much data was used, and how often files were access. Would a manual (rsync) synchronization work? Do the files have to be immediately available at both locations? Do people move to different sites more than once a day? How long would they wait?

Unless you have a private link between the two sites, you probably need to tunnel the data.

You could test it out first :) Maybe it would work.

Have fun,
chris

PS If anyone is using these network file systems, please enlighten us.