[wplug] The Ultimate Desktop I

[Jonathan Billings]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 18:28:48 -0500 (EST), Brandon Kuczenski
<brandon at 301south.net> wrote:
> 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.

It'd probably be easier to just copy the passwd entries.  I never
reccomend anyone use NIS anymore.  In your situation, it's simpler to
just manually copy the passwd entries.  You'll have to set a local
password on the workstation too.

> 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.

Gnome likes to store a socket file in
~/.gconf/%gconf-xml-backend.lock/ior that might cause you problems. 
Both Gnome and KDE will sometimes get confused if you are making
changes to their configurations in the home directory from two
different systems.


-- 
  Jonathan Billings
jsbillings at gmail.com