Hi Friends and Gurus,

I configured openLdap in RHEL5 on virtual achines,everything is working fine, I created a user called ldapuser,in LDAP server and i created a home directory for ldapuser in my LDAP client, now i can able to login to the both Server and client with ldapuser account....

Now here what am expecting is i want to export my server's home directory to the client, i dont want to create home directories manually in the client machine, i googled about that, and it can be done through autofs.....

Can any one please guide me....what need to be done on the client and server side.

any help is appreciated

Thanks In Advance
JNReddy

well what you're asking for is nothing whatsoever to do with LDAP. You need to appreciate what things are and are not related. A users home directory is defined in their user information, and that is totally abstracted from the source of that information. Basically you just need to set up a standard NFS server and mount the exported /home on each appropriate client. You can use mechanisms like automount to improve this but a single entry in /etc/fstab is usually fine.

@acid_kewpie: It can be done with LDAP and autofs, but you are right you need to setup a NFS server for this.

For this you need an ldif that looks like this:
Of course you need to configure the autofs to connect to ldap as well. Unfortunately, I don't have this configuration file at hand now. However if I remember correctly, this is pretty straight forward. When autofs is configured to connect to the ldap server, the provided ldap entries will replace auto.master and auto.home files on your client.

Edit: In the last ldap entry, you shouldn't forget the / at the end of the path of the nisMapEntry property. You might also need to change something in the nsswitch.conf file. But I need to look that up as well.

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For what has been asked I think the above is massive overkill. It's very complete and good in general, but if you are *only* using autofs for /home then it's not justified in reality, and is more confusing than useful. For the first iteration at least, uttelry ignore ldap in relation to this query. Just start and end with setting up a simple NFS export.

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That really depends on how many clients you have to maintain and how you want to maintain it. What the OP is trying to accomplish is what is called roaming profiles in Windows. The advantage that you have is that you can configure the /home at one location. When you need to change something this is easily done at that location. The real issue with this setup is that when the NFS stops working or is not yet available nobody can access their files and settings on /home, but that is the case with any solution involving storing the /home on a remote server.
You could be right that this is not justified, but in my personal opinion there is not enough information from the OP to tell if this is the case. Besides it can be overkill now, but maybe it is good planning ahead to do so anyway.

Thanks Acid Kewpie and Blue ICE,

Agree both of you, I go with Blue ICE but again i confused about server and Client bcoz am not into much with LDAP.can you please specify what lines i have to insert from your output. what i understood is i need nfs to export the /home, and autofs to map the /home in cliet am i correct, please correct me if i am wrong...

Server side
1) auto.master
2) auto.misc

Client
1) auto.master
2) anto.misc


Thanks a Lot..n...LOL
JNReddy

Server side:
- LDAP server
- provided LDIF loaded into LDAP server
- Configured NFS

Client side:
- LDAP client
- Autofs

auto.master and auto.misc are replaced by the entries on the LDAP server.