Unix NFS – Is It Feasible to Host Home Folder with NFS?

home-directorynfsunixuser-management

I'm planning to deploy some kiosk computers and would like to leave them with a small pendrive as boot disk, keeping the rest at an easy to back up server, ala LTSP.

Right now I'm pondering two options. An NFSed /home/, or a local copy of ~/ copied on login, rsynced on logout.

My fears are that working with files might get too slow, or my network might get clogged.

Best Answer

I use NFS for my home directories in our production environment. There are a couple of tricks.

  1. Don't NFS mount to /home - that way you can have a local user that allows you in in the event that the NFS server goes down. We mount to /mnt/nfs/home

  2. Use soft mounts and a very short timeout - this will prevent processes from blocking forever.

  3. Use the automounter. This will keep resource usage down and also means that you don't need to worry about restarting services when the NFS server comes up if it goes down for some reason.

    auto.master:
  +auto.master
  /mnt/nfs /etc/auto.home --timeout=300

auto.home
   home -rw,soft,timeo=5,intr      home.bzzprod.lan:/home

  4. Use a single sign-on system so you don't run into permission related issues. I have an OpenLDAP server.

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