On Tuesday 21 October 2003 10:37 am, John Pettigrew wrote:
In a previous message, Nick LeRoy
wrote: On Tuesday 21 October 2003 9:49 am, John Pettigrew wrote:
I'd like to log into the main PC from the spare PC, using the userid and home dir from the main machine, but to run all apps etc. on the spare PC (a smart terminal, I guess).
Let's see... I'd probably:
1. Set up your main PC as an NFS server, export /home 2a. NFS Mount /home on the spare PC 2b. -or- Use the automounter (amd) to mount /home/foo when user foo logs in 3. Setup an NIS server on the main PC 4. Setup an NIS client on the spare PC
OK - NFS sounds like a Good Thing. However, I've heard that NIS isn't. Should I perhaps look at LDAP instead? I know nothing about either, but some swift research has suggested that NIS is being supplanted by LDAP for some reason.
Depends on your usage, actually. For a private home network, NIS should do just fine. You certainly wouldn't want to expose it to the external world, but, that goes for NFS, also.
IIUC, therefore, NFS lets the home directory be shared, and NIS/LDAP provides some other services?
I've heard rumors of people using LDAP for user management, but I've never actually seen it done. People I know that are somewhat knowledgable in LDAP say "yeah you can do it, but you probably don't want to". Stick to NIS unless you have a real reason not to. My $0.02 worth, at least.
Is there actually any need for anything beyond sharing /home/user? If I just mounted /home/user1 at /home/user1 on the second PC, would that not work?
That would work. I understood from your original message that you have more than one user, in which case exporting all of /home makes sense; on the client side you can use either amd or just mount all of /home. If you just want to share a single user, sure, it's fine to just mount /home/userx. Whatever works best for you; NFS is pretty flexible. :-) -Nick -- /`-_ Nicholas R. LeRoy The Condor Project { }/ http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~nleroy http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor \ / nleroy@cs.wisc.edu The University of Wisconsin |_*_| 608-265-5761 Department of Computer Sciences