Shared home directory for accounts on multiple hosts
 

I'm working on an 11-node cluster: 1 head node (hn01) and 10 computing nodes (cn01 thru cn10). RHEL-6. Ultimately what I'm trying to do is run mpirun on the cluster. I created a user account, "mac", on the head. This resulted in the expected /home/mac directory being created. When I ssh into one of the computing nodes I can see that directory in the mounted drive space. So far so good.

The problem is that there is no user "mac" on any of the computing nodes. I can create a "mac" account but then that account can't write to /home/mac, I assume because it is owned by the hn01:mac account.

How is this usually handled?

I should add that the whole reason I'm doing this is so I can save an ssh key in the computing node mac accounts to enable mpirun to use it. If there is a better way to do this then please let me know. Thanks.

You can use chown: That will give all the users in mac's group access to /home/mac. If you do: then only mac has access.