Verner Kjærsgaard said the following on 04/11/2010 03:09 PM:
a) I wanted to use remote/nfs'd storage for /home
That seems perfectly reasonable to me. SUN ("The Network is the Computer") was doing this back in the 1980s. You could log in from any workstation and LO! there was your home directory. Workstations were minimalist and accounts were managed by YP. This is all well documented. I've implemented this kind of thing at various sites with SunOS, Solaris, AIX and RedHat. Go google. E.g. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-nfs.html <quote> There is no need for users to have separate home directories on every network machine. Home directories could be set up on the NFS server and made available throughout the network. .... On large networks, it might be more convenient to configure a central NFS server in which to store all the user home directories. These home directories can then be exported to the network so that users would always have the same home directory, regardless of which workstation they log in to. ... </quote> and http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-nis.html <quote> It (YP/NIS) is a RPC-based client/server system that allows a group of machines within an NIS domain to share a common set of configuration files. This permits a system administrator to set up NIS client systems with only minimal configuration data and add, remove or modify configuration data from a single location. It is similar to the Windows NT® domain system; although the internal implementation of the two are not at all similar, the basic functionality can be compared. </quote> Of course BSD isn't quite Linux:-) But then it wasn't quite Solaris or AIX either, but I didn't find that a problem. However you might have a look at this http://www.linbai.info/science-engineering/managing-nfs-and-nis-2nd-edition.... and download the free copy.
b) I can't, because Firefox (and other programs too) breaks. It's a known bug.
Oh? I have a laptop with ~/.mozilla, ~/Documents, ~/Media and a few others NFS'd from a file server. I have problems, but they are with KDE4.4.2 :-) and Xorg and the Radeon driver, but that's another matter.
c) I'm forced to use /home on local harddisk in the box. Space here is limited.
Some of the old SUN workstations were really minimal, maybe a 3Meg disk and everything else by NFS/NIS
d) I then wish to have - say - /home/someuser/Documents mounted externally using nfs. This way a very limited space would be used locally and the brunt of storage would be remote.
Yes, I do this for my laptop even without NIS. -- The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive. -- John Sladek -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org