Hans -- ...and then Hans Witvliet said... % % Hi all, Hiya! % % I was wondering, there are several ways to separate the machine where % storage for home directories are provided from the place where it is ... % % 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 one end of the spectrum you can have a single NFS/SMB server % exporting the whole /home. While at the other end you could export each % user's home directory individually. % ... % On purpose i leave out a number of elementary items, like the storage % itself, network itself and geographically redundancy. % % Any admin around here confronted with likewise questions? % If there are any rules-of-thumbs, i'd like to know, as it kept me awake % all night ;-) [snip] If you're going to leave out geography and redundancy, then your problem becomes both simpler (only one source) and harder (one very busy source). And, yes, when one adds a few more zeros then things can change quickly. You haven't said what your storage platform is, and that makes a difference. Lots of high-end NAS frames can handle what you want; I'm familiar with NetApp Filers, but there are others as well. There's nothing that says a SuSE machine can't also serve out that much content, but you may be reinventing the wheel to develop and manage all of those exports, and if you're seriously going to be pushing that much traffic then either a little extra cost for a high-end NAS frame won't be an issue or someone is paying you to write high-end-capable management for the appliance you're designing, right? :-) In general, as already noted by others, the automounter is your friend and you probably can actually manage to have a few hundred mounts on your client with no problem; if it can handle the load of that many users doing stuff, then the mounts themselves shouldn't be a factor, and they'll fall away after an inactivity timeout. So that's where I'd start. And, finally, the one thing I haven't yet seen mentioned is to dereference your mounts by a level. Put everyone's home dir under the first two chars of the login, or the location & grade, or a three-digit hash of the name, or whatever -- and then mount those upper dirs with dozens of users beneath instead of the dozens of users directly. If you analyze carefully in advance and have a sufficient collision rate in your hashing function, you'll distinctly reduce the number of mounts on each client. You can afford even a complex or time-consuming hash because you only have to do it once per account. I'd love to see an analysis and summary of your results! HTH & HAND :-D -- David T-G See http://justpickone.org/davidtg/email/ See http://justpickone.org/davidtg/tofu.txt