Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: 2.4.17:Increase number of anonymous filesystems beyond 256? | Date | Fri, 18 Jan 2002 21:33:13 +0100 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
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Rainer Krienke <krienke@uni-koblenz.de> said:
[...]
> At our site we store all user (~4000 users) data centrally on several NFS > servers (running solaris up to now). In order to ease administration we > chose the approach to mount each user directory direcly (via automount > configured by NIS) on a NFS client where the user wants to access his > data. The most important effect of this is, that each users directory is > always reachable under the path /home/<user>. This proofed to be very > useful (from the administrators point of view) when moving users from one > server to another, installing additionl NFS servers etc, because the only > path the user knows about and sees when e.g. issuing pwd is > /home/<user>. The second advantage is, that there is no need to touch the > client system: No need for NFS mounts in /etc/fstab to mount the servers > export directory and so there are no unneeded dependencies frpm any > client to the NFS servers.
This is exactly what we do with our (much more modest) 600 accounts at the Departamento de Informatica of the UTFSM (Valparaiso, Chile).
> Now think of a setup where no user directory mounts are configured but > the whole directory of a NFS server with many users is exported. Of > course this makes things easyer for the NFS-system since only one mount > is needed but on the client you need to create link trees or something > similar so the user still can access his home under /home/<user> and not > something like /home/server1/<user>. Moreover even if you create link > trees when you issue commands like pwd you see the real path (eg > /server1/<user>) instead of the logical (/home/<user>). Such paths are > soon written into scripts etc, so that if the user is moved sometime > later things will be broken.
> You simply loose a layer of abstraction if you do not mount the users dir > directly. The only other solution I know of would be amd. Amd automatically > places a link. But since we come from the sun world, we simply uses suns > automounter and there were no problems up to now.
The SunOS automounter (which we used before Solaris) did this too. It was a pain in the neck, as the "real" path to the home does show through, and you get the same problems with scripts &c containing physical, not logical, paths to files. Fixing the _users_ is much harder than fixing up the configurations... -- Horst von Brand http://counter.li.org # 22616 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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