Dear Sergei, Second point is probably easier to do. An alternative to NFS is sshfs. The advantage is that it uses SSH which is installed by default and configured the same way. If you generate key pairs you can use ssh or sshfs without a password. Check this page below;
http://www.howtoforge.com/mounting-remote-directories-with-sshfs-on-ubuntu-11.10 Typically LDAP is being used for centralised authentication but NIS is probably just as good. Page below is about the client setup. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LDAPClientAuthentication Both of the above are more likely to survive upgrades. Adam