[wplug] The Ultimate Desktop I

[John Harrold]

Sometime in March Brandon Kuczenski assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| 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?

I do this at school and  home. I replaced my workstation at home with a
powerbook and it's more convenient to use unison and subversion to sync the
relevant files to my laptop, but I still use nfs and nis between my
servers. Files should be locked by NFS if that is required. For example,
vim doesn't really lock files. So I can write to the same file from two
different vim sessions regardless if it's on an NFS mount or not. If you're
going to use logins and stuff on more than two computers I'd take the time
to figure out NIS or something similar. I also use NIS to push out
automount information for the NFS mounts, /etc/hosts, and cups client
stuff.

-- 
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                            | /"\                         
 john harrold               | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign   
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 the most useful idiot      | / \                         
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 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, 
 and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought 
 under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of 
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 --Gandhi
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