[sclug] sharing $HOME on various machines

[John Stumbles]

Dickon Hood wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 21:43:53 +0000, Ed Davies wrote:
> : John Stumbles wrote:
> : >I want to mount /home from the machine where our home dirs live on other 
> : >machines (obviously enough). ...
> 
> You need to bear in mind that a symlink of the form you half-suggested
> (ie, including '$HOSTNAME' or whatever it was) won't work; 

I know :-(
I meant that as a textual short hand in my message.


> : Am I right in thinking that, when you mount a file system
> : on an system other than the one it was created for, the
> : user and group IDs actually used in the file system match
> : across the two systems, or is there some mapping somewhere
> : which I haven't read about yet?
> 
> The filesystem stores all this little lot numerically, and for display
> purposes, the local databases (PAM / /etc/{passwd,group} / NIS / LDAP /
> whatever) are consulted.

So you have to make sure your users have the same UIDs across all 
machines (this is where NIS comes in if you have more than 2 or 3 
machines to manage). Unfortunately you may still run into slight gotchas 
  as some distros create a group for each user and put them in that, 
whereas others just have a 'users' group. Not usually a show-stopper but 
may cause surprises if you're trying to share stuff between users.

-- 
John Stumbles