Hi,
This is my setup: Around 400 login ids, 50 machines, 2 fileservers.
Home directories of all users in these 2 fileservers only.
We use NIS for distributing the passwd and hosts databases.
I earlier used nfs mount as rich suggested, but then, if the server
goes down due to some reason and comes back, the clients wont
have the file system available when the student logs in, as
the mounting is done at boot time.
autofs is thought of because of this particular reason. And also,
the 400 login ids is a collection of 4 groups of students, each
group having 100 students. Some of this group may not be there at
all for weeks together(eg.students on vacation) and keeping their
file systems mounted always using nfs would be a waste of bandwidth.
In fact seperate filesystems are created with the idea that one
filesystem caters to one group of 100 students.
I hope the situation is clear enough for the gurus to give suggestions.
Hoping to hear from you,
Suresh
On Sat, Jun 17, 2000 at 03:05:33PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> hi suresh
>
> for 400 users ??? i think its time to centralize /home....
>
> probably have two /home file servers
> ( we'll worry about syncing data separately )
> ( we'll worry about backup of /home separately...
>
> all other pcs automounts home1:/home or home2:/home....
>
> for login passwd stuff....use NFS as rich suggests ??
> or you'd have to copy/enter passwd info for each user
> in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow ( bad idea )
>
> on each home server....don't forget to export the directory
> for exporting/reading/writing by the other server
> /etc/export
>
> on each clients...how many clients do you have and does
> each of the 400 login into a few machines or 400 machines
> that automounts home:/home/<user> ???
>
> answer would vary ??
>
> for each client....i'd do:
>
> a. /etc/auto.master
> /.autofs /etc/auto.home --timeout 600
>
> b. /etc/auto.home
> home -fstype=nfs[,other options] home1:/home
>
> c. fix some stuff
> cd / ; mv /home /home.org
> cd / ; ln /.autofs /home
>
> this way....all 400 users are maintained on home:/home
> and their login passwd is done with yp
>
> their home dir is automounted at any client machine
>
> - problem is if the home server dies...all 400 people is dead...
> - if the yp server dies....all 400 people is dead...
>
> have fun
> alvin
>
> On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Rich McClellan wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Suresh Kumar. R wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Thanks for the reply. Is it that I should have one entry corresponding
> > > to each student in the auto.home ? I have more than 400 students, so
> > > is there any better alternatives?
> > >
> >
> > If you are going to have them on just one or two machines, it is probably
> > best to not have individual entries for the students. Maybe you don't
> > even need to use autofs? Why not use plain NFS; chances are good that the
> > disk will always be mounted with 400 students and autofs. If you have
> > multiple servers with people moving around it is nice to have an entry for
> > each student in auto.home.
> >
> > You could also do something like:
> > foreach i (`cat /etc/passwd|cut -d : -f 1`)
> > echo "$i -hard,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 server1:/home/$i" >> auto.home
> >
> > (foreach is a tcsh thing)
> > to create each entry in auto.home (don't forget to remove the entries for
> > root, admin, etc.).
> >
> > later,
> > Rich
> >
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Suresh Kumar.R, Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept of Electronics & Communication
College of Engineering, Trivandrum - 695 016, INDIA
Phone: (O) 91 471 414634/418379, (R) 91 471 443496
