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Thread: Remote /home possible, feasable?

  1. #11
    Join Date
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    Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

    Re: Remote /home possible, feasable?

    Quote Originally Posted by 1clue View Post
    You might consider a central authentication scheme too, at least read about it. Maybe read here a bit: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNISHowTo

    I actually had to look for that, if you google anything reasonable it seems like most people are using Windows-based authentication.
    I used NIS back in my Solaris days too. The important thing that NIS provides (really any centralized authentication) for a Linux based network is common user/group id numbers (UID/GID) for the various users. NFS depends upon this. NIS is just something more to learn. For my home network I don't use it however. I only have to keep track of a few users UID/GID so I do it manually. Of course I am user 1000 and my wife is 1001. The tricky part is the GID (group ID's). Ubuntu just uses the next available GID if you don't explicitly state the GID for any group.

    Let me state that in a different way. Use a common users and group when you share data between machines and possibly users with NFS.

    As you can see it is more to it than just sharing one machines /home directory.
    -BAB1

  2. #12
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
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    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Remote /home possible, feasable?

    Hay,

    Since it will only be two machines (one client, one host if you wish) it will be simple I guess. Just setting up the "client" to use the same username (Even the host only has a single user account) as the host will already remove some issues, getting the GID UID the same should not be that difficult. The rest of the stuff seems to only apply on a larger scale deployment (virtual workstations?) where more than one "client" will connect to a "host".

    I'll set up a test scenario in a virtual environment first and see how it goes, if I encounter to many issues, I will just buy some more TB drives and rsync data between them (This might actually help since I then have a "backup" of my entire system as well.... hmmmmm)

    Anyway thanks again for all the help, now I only need to start trying it out and see if it works or not.

    Thanks
    Switched away from windows XP to Ubuntu 9.04. Never turned around to look back.

  3. #13
    Join Date
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    Re: Remote /home possible, feasable?

    Quote Originally Posted by zero2xiii View Post
    Hay,

    Since it will only be two machines (one client, one host if you wish) it will be simple I guess. Just setting up the "client" to use the same username (Even the host only has a single user account) as the host will already remove some issues, getting the GID UID the same should not be that difficult. The rest of the stuff seems to only apply on a larger scale deployment (virtual workstations?) where more than one "client" will connect to a "host".

    I'll set up a test scenario in a virtual environment first and see how it goes, if I encounter to many issues, I will just buy some more TB drives and rsync data between them (This might actually help since I then have a "backup" of my entire system as well.... hmmmmm)

    Anyway thanks again for all the help, now I only need to start trying it out and see if it works or not.

    Thanks
    A couple of points of clarification.

    Hosts can be either clients or servers of both. The host is the real or virtual machine. This means the OS running on physical or virtual hardware. A server in this context is the process running in the background waiting for a request from a client. The client on the other hand is the application that is the requester of those services. An example the server HTTPD can run on a host and that host can (through a browser) request web pages from itself. Think localhost.

    In Linux, The UID and GID is how file ownership is set. The user and group names are not how these entities are defined. Most of the time it will be the GID that will trip you up if you are the only user on both hosts. By definition on an Ubuntu host the first user is always 1000. The private user group is usually 1000, but it does not absolutely have to be so, The other group ID's should be monitored to see that they match up between the 2 hosts too.

    I have had to correct GID's when I got lazy, so I know it can happen.
    -BAB1

  4. #14
    Join Date
    Jul 2011
    Location
    South-Africa
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    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Remote /home possible, feasable?

    Quote Originally Posted by bab1 View Post
    A couple of points of clarification.

    Hosts can be either clients or servers of both. The host is the real or virtual machine. This means the OS running on physical or virtual hardware. A server in this context is the process running in the background waiting for a request from a client. The client on the other hand is the application that is the requester of those services. An example the server HTTPD can run on a host and that host can (through a browser) request web pages from itself. Think localhost.

    In Linux, The UID and GID is how file ownership is set. The user and group names are not how these entities are defined. Most of the time it will be the GID that will trip you up if you are the only user on both hosts. By definition on an Ubuntu host the first user is always 1000. The private user group is usually 1000, but it does not absolutely have to be so, The other group ID's should be monitored to see that they match up between the 2 hosts too.

    I have had to correct GID's when I got lazy, so I know it can happen.
    Sorry about the host vs server slip up. Must have been over tired when I typed it like that.

    Also agreed with the GID and UID issue, I will address those, although it seems my current user is 1000. My user is part of different groups so I guess I should match up all of those on the remote "client" then.

    Cheers
    Switched away from windows XP to Ubuntu 9.04. Never turned around to look back.

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