/home on server

linuxbird · 12-18-2021, 10:13 AM

For probably 20 years or so, I have been running Slackware, with a /home partition on a server, and the clients remote mounting that partition. Life has been good, and normally I run the same OS version on each of the clients. I also make /home mountable for the several Windoze laptops which are necessary for some applications.

I would like to transition from 14.2 to -current on one of the clients, and am wondering if anyone might have similar experience and can advise whether I am likely to have conflicts.

This is just a general inquiry, but I thought I should ask before I go through the process of the install on the client.

Thanks.

Windu · 12-18-2021, 10:31 AM

You could try booting up a Slackware Live ISO and find out whether there's anything unexpected which prevents mounting that server home.

linuxbird · 12-18-2021, 10:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Windu

You could try booting up a Slackware Live ISO and find out whether there's anything unexpected which prevents mounting that server home.

I do not envision prevention of mounting the /home, rather I am concerned about different /home/user1/.* type files which might be different between 14.2 and -current.

baumei · 12-18-2021, 01:16 PM

Since you are sharing the files on the server to both Windows and Linux clients, I deduce it is the data which is of interest.

What about modifying your scheme to where:

1. The ".*" hidden files are stored on the local machine.

2. The data-directory on the server is instead mounted on "/home/user1/data".

This way ".*" hidden files could differ from machine to machine, and thereby be in accord with the hardware and operating system and GUI characteristics of each.

linuxbird · 12-18-2021, 01:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by baumei

Since you are sharing the files on the server to both Windows and Linux clients, I deduce it is the data which is of interest.

What about modifying your scheme to where:

1. The ".*" hidden files are stored on the local machine.

2. The data-directory on the server is instead mounted on "/home/user1/data".

This way ".*" hidden files could differ from machine to machine, and thereby be in accord with the hardware and operating system and GUI characteristics of each.

That is an interesting approach. Not sure how I might implement it, as some .* files are used for application configuration.

I have not experienced a problem with the mix on a few Windoze machines and a large number of Linux (Slackware) workstations. 98% of the time I am only running Linux. The remainder I might copy a file from /home to a local directory on the Windoze machine. But there is not allot of traffic back and forth. But doing it this way saves sneakernet time.

Windu · 12-18-2021, 01:49 PM

Most Linux applications and desktop follow the configuration laid out in the XDG environment variables.
You might cover most of the user-specific configuration by specifying this in /etc/profile on the computer(s) you migrate to Slackware-current:

Code:

export XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local_current"
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config_current"
export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$HOME/.cache_current"
export KDEHOME="$HOME/.kde_current"