pam module to create home dir?

[Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade]

On Friday 02 April 2004 02:57 pm, Wade Curry wrote:
> I'm wondering... if a person needs to login to more than about 5
> hosts, why you wouldn't depend on home dirs on a distributed
> filesystem? (NFS mounted, or whatever)

1) NFS is fragile, and instabilities in that one NFS server could bring down 
a whole network of systems depending on it.

2) Institutional distrust of NFS. :)

3) NFS over WAN links is painful, at best.  God help you if the link gets 
interrupted while writing a file.

> I'm sure that there's a threshold where the effort to maintain NFS
> would be more than what it takes to maintain multiple home dirs,
> but I have no idea what that threshold would be.

That, and honestly, not all machines need an entire home directory available 
to them; most of them just need home dirs for the users so they can log in 
and have a little scratch space for doing the work they need to do.

It's really only a handful of servers that would benefit from shared /home, 
but those servers are spread across 5 offices at various points on the 
continent. 

If there were some way to have a distributed file server, such that the 
"master" copy of things lived in the main office, and "slave" servers 
handled each local office and stayed in sync with the master, that might be 
acceptable.

My other option is to scavenge new accounts from LDAP or have the management 
tool kick off a script that went around and created skeleton home dirs...  
But if someone already did the work, I see no need to duplicate it.

Gregory

-- 
Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <gkade at bigbrother.net>
OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B  keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
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