Hi,
I am working for a college where at least 500 students are studying in different streams.The problem is, mounting students' home directory shared through NFS on different desktops/laptops at different times - like when students are in different lab (RDBMS , OS LAB etc) they have to use desktops installed at the LABs, again when students are not in any lab, they are working on their laptops on college network. Now my problems are as follwos -

1. How to mount their individual home directory on different systems at different times - I have configured NIS and NFS server.

2. I have configured autofs on one system and checked for one user it is working fine. But when I am testing on a different system it is not working as autofs is not configured on that system - how to overcome this as if I have to configure every system then I have to configure at least 500 systems individually. Is there any script which will be at the NIS server and whenever students will login it will be executed as per their login name and their recpective home directory will be mounted on their local system?

Please help.

At work, I use puppet to distribute automount maps to several hundred computers and control the autofs daemon. However, all of these machines have static IPs (not mobile). You can also distribute the automount maps through NIS (or better yet, LDAP). A little bit of Googling shouls show you how to do this.

How are the mobile devices managed? Do end users have root access, or are they locked down with central control? Do they authenticate against the NIS server? What happens when the machine is totally disconnected from the network?

One thing I've done (a bit hacky I admit) if end users have root on their own devices is to give them a shell script with the correct commands to mount/unmount the network share with their home directory that they can run whenever they connect to the network. You could even have a clickable desktop icon to do this, but my users are fairly command-line savvy. This way they can have their own local storage on their laptop, but mount their network directory when on-site and connected.

Hi,
When students are under college network they are getting IPs from DHCP but outside network their own IP and we are not bothered about outside the network part and they will not get their home directory.

Mainly whenever they are connecting with the college server they should get their home directory on any device - mainly desktops provided by the college and if possible on their own laptops. I have already told the IT head, it is only possible if they are logging through NIS server.

Now problem is mounting the home directory on different device at different times.

If you kindly tell me more about Puppet.

Can the script be kept on the NIS server and executed according to the user login? If possible then we don't have to touch the LAB desktops and students' laptops.

Please see http://puppetlabs.com for information about Puppet. There is a free version of Puppet and a pay-for version. I've found the free version suitable for my needs, even up to several hundred machines, assuming the puppetmaster is strong enough, but YMMV. There are other option such as Chef, CfEngine, etc.You'll have to try a few out and decide if any of them work for you.

You need to understand that NIS is a directory service like LDAP, not a domain controller in the Active Directory-esque sense of the word. The login is handled locally by the client, although it receives information from NIS. If you want a script to be run at login time, you'll need to provision each machine to do this (can be done via Puppet). If you have Automount set up, then users just need to browse to the appropriate directory to see their files.

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