[wplug] The Ultimate Desktop I

[Brandon Kuczenski]

I am about to upgrade my home desktop computer from Windows 2000 to Debian 
3.  I would like my home directory on that machine (/home/brandon) to be 
an nfs mount of my home directory on my server.  I expect to have a 
/usr/local/home directory tree that doesn't get used for anything except 
when the server is down for some reason.  I have a few questions related 
to this arrangement:

I was just going to copy the relevant entries from the server's 
/etc/passwd file onto the desktop.  Alternately, I suppose I could make 
the server an NIS server as well?  I'm not exactly sure how that works.

Do I need to worry about two different computers each accessing the same 
location as my 'home' directory?  I can only think of it as a problem with 
respect to things like mail delivery, but I expect (a) that I'll configure 
the desktop MTA to just deliver mail to the server and (b) that NFS file 
locking will take care of any problems.

Are these notions correct?  Do I want to look into NIS?  other thoughts or 
comments?

Thanks,
Brandon

Part II to follow.