On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Joseph S. Gardner wrote:
:>Well folks, after all the great suggestions regarding my planned SOHO
:>setup & administration I thought I'd ask the next question that comes to
:>my feeble little mind.
:>
:>Is it possible to split the /home mounts over several drives / machines
:>and still refer to them as /home. Does NIS / NFS handle this (I know
Hi
Since disks are big and cheep these days, I suppose this is a question
which gets asked by everyone who uses PC-s in networked enviroment.
In short: YES
I have a small system made from standard PC-s running as a linux NIS-group
for the last 4-5 years at , and it works very nicely.
Here is the description:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- A single NIS-server serves the whole group. Its uptimes are usually
around 100 days, before I have to make some updates (which always
happens off-hours), so I never bothered to install a secondary server.
This machine is also a central mail-hub.
- All the "newer" computers have approximately the same setup. Divergence
is kept minimal by letting the "autorpm" automaticaly install any new
programs over night.
- Each of these machines exports all of its
directories to other machines: /home (rw), and other dirs (ro). "home"
dirs are auto-mounted everywhere as /homes/MACHINE-NAME using the autofs.
In addition, a standard amd-map makes it possible to access all the data
on any machine using the /net/MACHINE-NAME. The reason for using both amd
and autofs is simple: autofs cannot auto-mount the whole export tree. amd
can, but it is rather instable.
- In addition, exports to a central NIS-server are done with
"no-root-squash". This comes very handy, because one can add new users on
the central machine, although their home-dirs reside on another one, by
simply specifying /homes/MACHINE-NAME as its home directory. It
also makes backuping a whole NIS-group from a central server possible.
- Several old (486) computers are set-up with a rather minimal
linux-configuration, and made into X-terminals. Because of the small
monitors, and crappy graphics these beasts are not used much, but they do
come handy from time to time for reading e-mails and so. Besides, they
require no maintainance.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Looking back at these 4-5 years, I think this setup proved to be ideal
for our University enviroment. The linux-workstations are rather "fat",
i.e. every of them comes with the full set of programs, and
user-directories are on their own machines, but the whole system can be
kept reasonabely homogeneous because of the "autorpm".
Since IDE disks are really cheap, and our network is only 10Mb/s, this
leads to better performance and much better scaling at lower price
compared to attaching a SCSI raid array to a NIS-server. Besides, we can
get a money for a new PC now-and-there, but buying dedicated
server-hardware is somewhat out of scope.
The most difficult task was making it clear
that PC-s should not be turned off overnight. Pleeding for a "friendly"
behaviour (please do not turn it of, other people may be doing their
calculations on your PC, want to print on your printer etc) did not help
much, but mentioning something like: "Backups are done overnight. If your
PC is turned off, it will not be backed-up!" did wonders.
My suggestions to making this setup even better and easier to maintain
would include "dhcp" server (easier configuration of the client machines),
slave NIS-server (so that the main NIS-server can be turned off), and
maybe something like a "mosix" cluster, so that everyone gets more
performance with no additional work.
hope this helps
Denis
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Denis Havlik ||| http://www.ap.univie.ac.at/users/havlik
(@ @) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for.
