Setting up Home dirs...

[Frank P. Bresz]

In article <2422 at dali> osyjm at caesar.cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen) writes:
>How are other admin's setting up users home directories on a wide variety of
>machines?  Does each user have a home dir on each "logically" related
>set of machines?  Other ways?

>I've been playing with automount under Ultrix 4.0, but it doesn't seem to
>stand up to a lot of pounding...  How about using amd?

>I've looked at Project Athena, but that's just a tad on the overkill side of
>things for my needs...

>Anyway, I'm just looking for alternatives to how I do it now...  E-mail or
>post replies, and I'll post a summary if demand warrants.

	I for one am using the automounter.  SunOS 4.0.3 and now SunOS 4.1
seem to do a fairly reasonable job of handling automounting.  I haven't
played with it much to tune the timeouts and such.  I really should because
I have noticed a few problems.  

	Anyway Sun seems to support the theory that users 'home' accounts
belong in /home.  Also I attended a class at Sun (before they really
entrenched the automounter) which suggested making home accounts be in
/home/<machine>/<user>.  I have abstracted this slightly.  Every single
user who wants a network account will get an account whose 'home' directory
is /home/nfsmt/<user>,  nfsmt being a handle for NFS mount point.  Then in
the auto mount maps I have each user mapped accordingly.  Here are some
relevant pieces of my auto.master and auto.home files.

/etc/auto.master
/home/nfsmt	auto.home	-intr,nosuid
/emacs		auto.emacs	-intr,nosuid

/etc/auto.home

fpb		kirin:/home/kirin/fpb
rklatt		kirin:/home/kirin/rklatt
mance		ittc:/home/ittc/mance
silverio	ittc:/home/ittc/silverio
inslib		ittc:/home/ittc2/inslib
ket		ittc:/home/ittc1/ket
gdelucia	ittc:/home/ittc3/gdelucia


Notice that this allows all users to have very similar looking accounts.
Yet be scattered over various machines and disks rather easily.  1 of the
reasons I use /home/nfsmt and not just /home is that I also have to support
certain accounts on machines which must act in a certain way in our production
environment.  Which basically is for non-computer types.  This allows them
to log in as a specfic user and do only what they need to do.  Anyway these
accounts I have in NIS(YP) as /home/<acct> it enables a visual difference
between accounts which are network wide and those that area machine
specific. 
--
| ()  ()  () | Frank P. Bresz   | Westinghouse Electric Corporation
|  \  /\  /  | fpb at ittc.wec.com | ITTC Simulators Department
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| ---------- | (412)733-6749    | My opinions are mine, WEC don't want 'em.