user's home directory on NFS server--what happens when user logs in from 2 computers?

Mountain · 03-18-2009, 02:58 PM

On my home network I have several computers including an NFS (Ubuntu 8.10) file server.

I use the same username (and uid) on all machines. I want to have my home directory on the NFS server, but I often log in to that machine (with that same username) locally. I also stay logged in to several other machine (desktop + laptop) at the same time.

Can I mount my home directory from the NFS server on all clients at the same time?

What is the best way to handle this? (I don't want to use LDAP or anything complex. There are only a few users on my home network.)

Here's what I've been reading so far:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/L..._24089056.html
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-nf...ntu-8.04-amd64
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=249889
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NFSv4Howto
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo

Mountain · 03-18-2009, 03:35 PM

This seems to be the answer:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...51&postcount=3

Quote:

2) Doing this is a bad idea. It seems really good and logical to do it but its just not. If the server isn't on or crashes or corrupts the /home directory or any number of other things suddenly you can't log in to any of your systems. Thats no good. There may also be problems if you are logged in as the same user on two or more systems with lock files and multiple writes to the same file and all sorts of other nasty problems. What ever you decide to do make sure you have 1 regular user whose home directory is not NFS mounted. Usually this would be root but root is disabled in Ubuntu so make your own user. Make sure that user has sudo/admin permissions as well.

3) The traditional best practices approach is to just share the documents/music/videos/whatever that you need and mount them to some mount point. Then you can soft link to that mount point from in your home and bingo. Yes you have the change your settings 5 times. Yes that is annoying. Its still better than 1 mistake messing up all your computers.

Anyone disagree?