Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3785 mails)

[Nick LeRoy <nleroy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 21 October 2003 10:37 am, John Pettigrew wrote:
> In a previous message, Nick LeRoy <nleroy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 21 October 2003 9:49 am, John Pettigrew wrote:
> > > I'd like to log into the main PC from the spare PC, using the userid
> > > and home dir from the main machine, but to run all apps etc. on the
> > > spare PC (a smart terminal, I guess).
> >
> > Let's see...  I'd probably:
> >
> > 1. Set up your main PC as an NFS server, export /home
> > 2a. NFS Mount /home on the spare PC
> > 2b. -or- Use the automounter (amd) to mount /home/foo when user foo logs
> > in 3. Setup an NIS server on the main PC
> > 4. Setup an NIS client on the spare PC
>
> OK - NFS sounds like a Good Thing. However, I've heard that NIS isn't.
> Should I perhaps look at LDAP instead? I know nothing about either, but
> some swift research has suggested that NIS is being supplanted by LDAP for
> some reason.

Depends on your usage, actually.  For a private home network, NIS should do 
just fine.  You certainly wouldn't want to expose it to the external world, 
but, that goes for NFS, also.

> IIUC, therefore, NFS lets the home directory be shared, and NIS/LDAP
> provides some other services?

I've heard rumors of people using LDAP for user management, but I've never 
actually seen it done.  People I know that are somewhat knowledgable in LDAP 
say "yeah you can do it, but you probably don't want to".  Stick to NIS 
unless you have a real reason not to.  My $0.02 worth, at least.

> Is there actually any need for anything beyond sharing /home/user? If I
> just mounted /home/user1 at /home/user1 on the second PC, would that not
> work?

That would work.  I understood from your original message that you have more 
than one user, in which case exporting all of /home makes sense; on the 
client side you can use either amd or just mount all of /home.  If you just 
want to share a single user, sure, it's fine to just mount /home/userx.  
Whatever works best for you; NFS is pretty flexible.  :-)

-Nick

-- 
 /`-_    Nicholas R. LeRoy               The Condor Project
{     }/ http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~nleroy  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor
 \    /  nleroy@xxxxxxxxxxx              The University of Wisconsin
 |_*_|   608-265-5761                    Department of Computer Sciences