On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 06:07:52PM +0100, lynn wrote: [ 8< ]
For nfs, the user need (should) only exist at the server end of the connection. If the same user exists on both the client and the server then which set of files does she get and how does she benefit from an nfs mount? The only advantage I could see in that would be if she required two sets of userspace. One for her files on the server and another for her files on the client. You would then mount her server files on a separate mount point on the client so she would have the benefit of both. But surely, the point of nfs is that the client needs only bare bones. The data is mounted on the client. It is as if the user were sitting at the server.
But how does a NFS setup handles the disconnected use case? That's the most tricky part. As we're all used to work with more than one system and mobile computing is already post pleading edge this is the bigger itenm to me. Even with a system permanently connected to the network a local copy of the current content has a huge advantage. Think of network or server outage situations. It might also reduce the load, pressure to the server. Andreas, one of my freinds from the samba.org side, works on http://www.csync.org/ to get this well integrated. The general idea had been to have something like roaming profiles with Linux. We had been faced by this while working on the integration of Linux system into an existing Microsoft Active Directory environment. The goal is to have a mechanism which works independent from the actual authentication target your're using. With the ID mapping as used in Samba's winbindd we're quite flexible. From my very quick check dcache.conf doen't offer this. But one of you might have some more experience with it. Cheers, Lars -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany