[Tfug] nfs home folder

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 02:55:09PM -0700, christopher wrote:
>have any of you ever set up a system where your primary
>user's login home directory is an nfs directory.
>
>Does it work? should I be aware of anything? The main
>reason I want it is for csc 335 this fall. I have a
>java workspace at home, but I think I'll be doing a lot
>of work on the road and I thought it would be nice not
>to have two different workspaces.

I've done this on a number of machines, but only on a LAN.

You mention doing it on the road and I'm not sure NFS is good for that.  NFS
security (pre-v4) is essentially nonexistant.  I've read about the security
features of v4 but have yet to set it up.  This is less a concern if you're
tunneling NFS through SSH, for example.

Also, under a normal configuration, NFS is very intolerant, from a user's
point of view, of network issues.  If your link goes down or hiccups, whatever
program is doing the I/O, be it a browser or 'ls' will just freeze.
Fortunately, it will pick up where it was when the link comes back and thus
(usually) preserve data.  You can change this with mount options, but then you
might face data loss.  This is the main reason I wouldn't use NFS outside of a
LAN.  On a LAN the network is usually very stable and NFS performs very well.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
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