Help managing a secondary Desktop user account from a primary 'Administrator' account

[TheFu]

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Thanks for the offer, I already exclusively run NFS on our network. It always baffles me why Linux defaults to installing ******* networking but omits NFS. I note your comment re user IDs being mapped 1:1 on all systems. The only niggle I have with NFS is I have mapped NAS drives on my PC and it hangs my desktop if the NAS goes offline for any reason. I gather from googling the problem this is a 'feature' of the NFS system.
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NFS supports a timeout, so when the remote storage isn't available, then it will only block for a short period. Also, you can use the automounter, not a full-time fstab mount with NFS.

If you have a 100 Mbps network or faster, forcing all NFS to use TCP would reduce the chance of data corruption.

autofs is the older method to use the client-side automounter. It has well-used, well-understood, setup but is more complex than the newer, systemd-automount method available in 16.04 and later. An example:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....6#post13935156

I've been using autofs for a very long time for NFS, CIFS, and USB storage. Basically, any storage that isn't always connected. I wanted control over the mount options and especially the locations. I've been badly burned by the /media/ use, plus permanent mounts aren't supposed to go there according to the file system hierarchy standards.

Discovered the systemd-automount capability just a few months ago. Been using it a few months. Extremely solid and performs the same as autofs or simple fstab mounts. No issues with it at all. I'll migrate off autofs completely. This is all client-side config. The NFS server still uses the /etc/exports file in the normal way. My NFS servers never go off-line unless I take them down or there's a HW failure.

Guess we've beaten this topic. If you think it is SOLVED, please use the Thread Tools and mark it so.

[PaulM55]

Yes, this topic is now definitely solved thank you, the second PC is set up and working exactly as I wanted both locally and using remote access.

Ditto with my NAS server, on 24/7 unless I take it down. I run embedded XigmaNAS (was NAS4Free) from a USB memory stick on a Prolient MicroServer which, unfortunately, requires a reboot to upgrade the embedded software. It's quite slow upgrading, during which time my networked PCs are locked due to the NFS problem. I shall take a closer look at your comments re NFS when I get the time.

PaulM

[PaulM55]

Not quite finally solved

The files I'm copying to the desktop user folders are a mixture of created folders, downloaded doc, docx, pptx & pdf files and PDFs I've created. When copied some of them have the correct permissions applied, others don't, the group permission remains with me. Looking at the documentation for the 'g+s' option it's clear not all files and folders will necessarily have the changed permissions applied.

The simple solution seems to be to create a ZIP archive of the content to be copied, copy the *ZIP* archive across, then unzip the content. If I do this *ALL* content has the correct permissions applied

PaulM