-----Original Message----- From: Per Jessen <per@computer.org> To: opensuse@opensuse.org Subject: Re: [opensuse] home dirs Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 10:33:14 +0200 Hans Witvliet wrote:
Hi all,
I was wondering, there are several ways to separate the machine where storage for home directories are provided from the place where it is needed. This is needed in case you have multiple (virtual) desktop machines, where a number of people could log in.
Most obvious techniques are nfs and smb, and perhaps if you can enforce that no one is ever logged in twice, one might use raw block devices.
Point that kept me awake, is the scalability: it might very well work for ten or hundred users, but what when confronted with 1000, 10.000 or more users?
At the desktop-side, i presume you have to limit the amount of simultaneously logged in users to 100-200 (depending on the amount of mem in a server). And with pam, you can mount the user dir when needed.
automount works very well too when working with individual mounts.
Clearly, from the point of view of load and availablity single exporting servers should be ruled out. But how many exports is feasable?
And how many nfs/smb-services can you have on a single server?
Depends on the server :-) -----Original Message----- Hi Anton, David, Per, Lynn and all others... Thanks also for the trip down to memorylane: been there, done that, specially Hummingbird ;-) And no problems with articles in other languages, as long as i dont have to embarresh myself by trying to speak French or so... Yes, i intend to use the automount, so user's dirs are not mounted when not needed. It is not so much the client i'm worried about: There it is just adding more clients behind a load balancer. I was warned that i should not use ext3 for /home, as you are limited to 30,000 subdirs. For ext4 i know that limit is raised to 60,000. Is there a known ceiling for btrfs? For a very small-scale demo, i can use a 4TB nas, but i can probably use a 9TB IBM SAN with double nics For another project, i used a single NFS-server exporting home-dirs only holding NX-config and firefox-cach. But on HP-Proliant-G7 with sles, we ran into lots of (performance) problems. So this time i would like to avoid it, with an overdimensioned demo, instead of the ducktape afterwards. I understood that it is hard to transparantly balance NFS-srvers, that i should avoid it, by specifying different homedirs from ldap. I was told that this is the way they do this in a Windows environment. Can i also do this for Linux. And i forgot to mention, I start with a very thin-client (only nx/x2go/thinlinc) and they get to choose between an virtualised remote XP/W7 desktop or an LXDE desktop. And either desktop must be provided with home-storage. Hans -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org