[Robert Paulsen]
[John Ryan]
I am in the process of setting up a multi-boot system, where I may have Suse, Ubuntu and possibly another variant of linux. (I am in learning mode) Will there be any problems if I mount /home on one partition (say on /dev/hda5), and use that partition as /home for all of the flavours of linux? [...] Is it a good idea?
I think this is a good idea, given all distributions behave reasonably.
Here is a starter list to consider...
Good list! :-)
1) one installation wiping out the home directory of another [...]
What we do is making sure all homes are kept on /usr/local/home of their respective machines (each user has a preferred machine, and we used to keep their home near them; yet as of now, we moved all homes on a big and fast machine used as a file server). Then /home holds only a flurry of symbolic links, one per user, and the links are designed so they trigger the autofs machinery. It works very well for our team.
2a) Actual user/group IDs (not the names but the numerical IDs) [...]
For long, NFS has been able to translate IDs on the fly. However, for much longer, we never took chance with this, and have a central place for managing all user ids, and always kept them unique. So in practice, I cannot witness of the NFS translating machinery. But in theory, this should not give any problem.
2b) This might require extra care if each distro uses a different pasword scheme (MD5, legacy, etc.).
Not really, as long as each machine do its own validation. We avoided NIS so far (yet we ponder with the idea of giving it another try).
2c) SuSE puts all users in a group named "users". Red Hat creates a separate group for each user (with a name to match the user's name).
We merely follow the RedHat method on all our SuSE systems with no adverse effect. Users are also members of groups according to the local administrative structure of sub-teams.
3) .profile, .bashrc, etc.
This is more likely to be a problem. Our solution is that each user, besides his/her shared homes (we have more women then men here!), may have an own local area on each machine. By using symbolic links into that local area from with the shared area (we have a consistent way to do so), some files in the shared home "look" different from machine to machine. There is a danger however: some programs either mistrust symbolic links for their configuration, or radically remove them before saving back the configuration. We have been lucky enough to find a solution in each and every problematic case we saw so far, so it currently works for us, but we cannot assert it will always work.
4) "dot" files [...] may not all be compatible with different versions of these apps on different distros.
The solution for the previous point is also a solution for this one.
5) I am sure there are more ...
Undoubtedly. In our experience, however, this has been workable. It wholly relies on the fact that we systematically rework /home and /usr/local on each distribution we install, as part of our installation procedures, as links within other partitions, often on other machines. -- François Pinard http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca