On 16/05/11 11:15, Tony Travis wrote:
> On 16/05/11 05:25, Martin Bähr wrote:
>   >  On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 05:38:31PM +0100, Tony Travis wrote:
>   >>  The FHS seems to be focussed on 'stand-alone' machines that may or may
>   >>  not mount some network filesystems as a client, but it does not state
>   >>  how filesystems should be 'exported' (or shared) by network servers or
>   >>  by 'servents' (i.e. machines that can be both clients and servers).
>   >>
>   >>  For example, the FHS states that 'home' directories should be within:
>   >>
>   >>      /home
>   >>
>   >>  This directory could, of course, be mounted from an NFS server, but it
>   >>  is more flexible to use it as an automount point instead. In the case of
>   >>  BSD and SunOS/Solaris, 'exported' home directories on a server (or
>   >>  servent) are typically sub-directories of:
>   >>
>   >>      /export/home
>   >
>   >  i suppose /srv can be used for this purpose.
>
> Hi, Martin.
>
> Yes, it can but the widely adopted convention for NFS automounted home
> directories is to use /export/home. However, if using /srv for this was
> to become part of FHS then it may be more widely adopted. An important
> aspect is that the server mounts /srv/home as a client e.g.:
>
>     hostname:/srv/home ->  /home/hostname
>
> Then all the hosts in the network can automount /home/hostname
>
>   >>  All machines, including an NFS servent exporting its own 'home' folder,
>   >>  use the same automount map where the hostname is now part of the path to
>   >>  the user's home directory:
>   >>
>   >>      host1:/export/home/user1 ->   host2:/home/host1/user1
>   >>      host2:/export/home/user2 ->   host1:/home/host2/user2
>   >>
>   >>  For example, the home directory of user1 on any host would then be:
>   >>
>   >>      /home/host1/user1
>   >>
>   >>  Using the automounter, 'home' directories are now 'exported' from one
>   >>  host and 'follow' users as they login on different hosts in a network.
>   >>
>   >>  FHS 3.0 could incorporate this widely adopted scheme for using network
>   >>  filesystems more transparently on NFS servers, clients and servents.
>   >
>   >  and thus force everyone to use it? i think the FHS is mostly concerned
>   >  with issues that relates to the interaction among applications. things
>   >  that applications can expect, and that distributors should follow to
>   >  meet those expectations. i can't think of any application that would
>   >  break because nfs server directories are in a non-standard location (but
>   >  my experience on this is quite limited so there may be some). this is
>   >  all a configuration issue anyways.
>
> One of the issues I faced when migrating from SunOS/Solaris to Linux was
> the convention in many distributions to create home directories as:
>
>     /home/username
>
> Instead of:
>
>     /home/hostname/username
>
> This, of course, is OK for stand-alone machines. However, I posted this
> message here in order to address the issue of how to automount /home in
> a networked environment in the light of a widely adopted convention of:
>
>     hostname:/export/home ->  /home/hostname
>
> I accept that /srv could be used instead of /export despite the fact
> that /export is widely used at present. However, I think that /home is
> often assumed to be a directory when it can, in fact, be an automount
> point. This leads to problems if packages or installation scripts
> attempt to rename or create directories in /home. For example:
>
>     /home/db    # used by Bio-Linux to store shared databases
>
> On our systems, I have to create a host alias "db" for "bobcat" in the
> automount map so that this path is accessible on all hosts:
>
>     bobcat:/export/db ->  /home/db
>
> There are numerous ways this problem can be solved, of course, and I
> want us to discuss if and how well-known solutions can be incorporated
> into the FHS.
>
> As I said in my previous message, the FHS seems to be focussed on
> stand-alone machines. I think it would be useful to broaden it out to
> include some well-known ways of exporting/sharing network filesystems.

Hi, Martin.

This man page describes how /export is used under FreeBSD/SunOS:

> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=filesystem&manpath=SunOS+4.1.3

Bye,

   Tony.
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