Arch Linux

Alethos

Member

Registered: 2006-01-05

Posts: 84

[SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

Basically what I desire is to have "roaming profiles" i.e. whatever machine me or my wife logs into we'll have our desktop waiting for us via centralized storage. I've scoured the web and arch forums and I can't seem to get this working. I've nfs working now, sweet!!!... but the centralized /home eludes me.

According to this post http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=1858
     

..Another approach is to install autofs. And have your shared fs's mounted when you access them & unmounted after a predefined period of inactivity. The AL pkg by default checks for nfs shared volumes by accessing /var/autofs/net/HOSTNAME/SHARE
so simply modify your user' s home entry in /etc/passwd to /var/autofs/net/SERVER/SHARE...

which goes along with another post (don't remember where it was at, other than here in the AL forums) saying for autofs, don't follow the wiki because arch doesn't play the same as other distros when it comes to the auto.master and auto.misc files. I tried several different ways I found on the web and they don't work. Fine. How do I get it to work w/ Arch?

Simply editing the /etc/passwd file as suggested above returns an error whilst logging in (to gnome via gdm that is) "something akin to /var/autofs/net/SERVER/SHARE does not exist, would you like to use / as home?"

One piece of the puzzle missing for me is when I check /var/autofs/net .... there's nothing in net's directory. Is this the problem? How do i fix it? Better yet, how do i get this doggonned thing working?

Last edited by Alethos (2007-02-26 23:48:06)

skr

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

You could (or should imho) mount your remote home directory directly to /home via nfs.

And make sure all users have the same uid/gid, password and the like on each system. You might even do that via ldap, which works really nice.

Alethos

Member

Registered: 2006-01-05

Posts: 84

Re: [SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

Meh, I was hoping to start learning/messing with LDAP AFTER I got /home over nfs. For right now uid and gid will be no problem as I'm just testing with one user. What would be the order of operations as far as logging in goes? Log in as user on server first, log in as user on machine 2nd, map /home to nfs share?

RedShift

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2004-07-16

Posts: 230

Re: [SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

On your server have something like:
/etc/exports:
/vol/home       *(rw,no_root_squash,async)

on the client have something like:
/etc/fstab:
192.168.0.1:/vol/home   /home       nfs     rsize=16384,wsize=16384,tcp     0       0

Just make sure UID's/GID's on all computers are the same, optionally use NIS for that.

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:?

Alethos

Member

Registered: 2006-01-05

Posts: 84

Re: [SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

Cool, got it working thanks to you both. Although it seems like a *ahem* hack of sorts. Shouldn't it be doable via autofs? More of a rhetorical ? since it's working now but ... still would like to know. Thanks again.

skr

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

What does it make look like a hack then?

It is a very nice solution actually. Just adding ldap authentication finishes it.

Alethos

Member

Registered: 2006-01-05

Posts: 84

Re: [SOLVED]autofs, nfs and /home

I guess the fact that there's supposed to be an easier Arch way to do it and I couldn't figure it out makes me feel like this way (which works fine and dandy excepting automounting SD cards and jumpies (nickname for USB Pen/Jump/Flash drives)) is a hack...Just my own disappointment with myself really.