"Joseph S. Gardner" wrote:
>
> Is it possible to split the /home mounts over several drives / machines
> and still refer to them as /home. Does NIS / NFS handle this (I know
> RTFM and I am it's just that "inquiring minds gotta know" and I haven't
> gotten that far YET).
NIS has nothing to do with you. NIS is used to pass system wide
information (like a Central password file). It has some serious
security implications. You probably do not need NIS if all you
are doing is placing NFS partitions in other computers.
As for mounting directories or pratitions...
Think of your directory structure as a TREE. YOu have the main
trunk, which is / and you have subdirectories, like /etc,
/home,
/var and so on. These are main branches. Lets talk about /home.
In /home, you have subdirectories, like /home/allen, /home/bob,
/home/charlie and /home/david. These are smaller branches.
Let us say that user Bob also has a directory called
/home/bob/data.
This is a twig. Finally, there are files, such as
/home/bob/lulu.exe,
/home/bob/data/march.dat These are leaves.
Now, your drive is getting full.... you need to split things off
to another drive.
If this was a tree, you can climb up there with a chainsaw and cut
off a limb. Now pay attention. Let us say you sever the main
branch at /home, where /home joins the main tree. Immediately
this branch falls to the ground, along with all directories
tied to it, including allen, bob, charlie and dave. You can
carry this branch off to another place (drive or partition), but
you cannot reattach any of this to the main tree.
This principle applies no matter at what point you "cut" the
branch. If you cut it at /home/bob/data, then /home/bob stays
on the tree, and data falls off. That, and any subdirectories it
contains can be mounted elsewhere.
Let us say you cut bob off. So the main tree contains
/home/allen,
/home/charlie and /home/dave, but bob fell off. Now you can take
bob, and mount it to another drive or partiton. Assume its a
different drive. You format and partition this drive, and for
example only, assume you format it as one single large partiton.
It has a ROOT / for that drive in a physical sense, but you need
to mount as /home/bob. No problem. You can do it this way
manually
if it is drive hdb:
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb /home/bob
You do not want to do this manually every time, so you can write
the info in /etc/fstab
The same principle applies to NFS mounts, except you use the NFS
volume instead of /dev/hdb.
Just remember about how much of the tree falls when you make the
cut. Nothing that falls off can be reattached to the original
tree.
/home/bob/data/january
/home/bob/data/february
/home/bob/data/march
You would like to move DATA off to another drive, except
February, which you would like to leave attached. This cannot
be done. The cut between data and february drops february and
it has to go elsewhere. If you cut between bob and data, all
of data falls off and none of the months can come back to the
original partition (or mount point to be exact).
On another vein, no related exactly. If you use NFS to mount
remote drives etc. and the remote computer goes off line while
things are still NFS mounted, all sorts of nasties will happen.
NFS gets very annoyed. Typically things freeze up. This is
one of the reasons it is not a good idea to NFS things among
desk computers. You have no control who does what.
Have you looked at the Snap! Server? It is a box with one or
two hard drives. Prices start at $499. Runs Linux, has web
based administration, has no video or keyboard. Just power and
10/100 ethernet. You fire it up, set your browser to its
default address like http://192.168.1.1 and configure it for
your network. There are setups in there to partition things
so those partitons become NFS volumes (for Linux users), Samba
shares (for Win95/98/NT users) and Apple users. A version with
dual 10 GB drives is $999. You can set the drives in tandem
to make 20GB of storage, or set it for RAID 1 to mirror each
other so if one drive dies, the thing keeps going and does not
lose your data.
I have misplaced the link to the main factory site, but here is
one link to the thing with prices that will get you started.
Search the net for the manufacturer site. I love the Snap!
its plug-n-play and easy to set up. Runs Linux, but you do not
have to know anything about Linux to set it up.
http://store.yahoo.com/meridiandata/snapserver.html
Buy one of those puppies, stick it in a closet, feed it mushrooms.
It will work 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, never miss a beat and
you do not have to spend 6 months learning arcane stuff to do
what you want. Your desktops are not tied up, and if any desktop
dies, you still have a network. Lastly, the Snap! is the perfect
place to copy backup files (or entire drive backups) to.
This is not the only network drive sold. Cobalt has rack mounted
ones, check it out at http://www.cobaltmicro.com Again, they
run Linux. Costs a bit more, though, but they are very good.
--
Ramon Gandia ============= Sysadmin ============== Nook Net
http://www.nook.net [EMAIL PROTECTED]
285 West First Avenue tel. 907-443-7575
P.O. Box 970 fax. 907-443-2487
Nome, Alaska 99762-0970 ==== Alaska Toll Free. 888-443-7525
