[clug] Local configuration on a non-homogeneous LAN

[George at Clug]

On Friday, 21-06-2019 at 23:39 Brenton Ross via linux wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am looking for some thoughts...
> 
> I am trying to set up a LAN consisting of a CentOS 7 server, plus a
> variety clients.
> The users will be defined in LDAP, and that part is working OK - they
> can log into the clients.
> The user's files will be stored on the server and made available via
> NFS - this is where I am foreseeing some issues that I would like some
> opinions on.
> 
> As I mentioned, the clients will be mostly different from each other -
> some Scientific Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and others. They might also be
> at different releases. Basically the operating systems will be tailored
> to the software installed on each machine.
> 
> It occurs to me that a lot of software stores its user specific
> configurations in the ~/.config and ~/.local directories. If these are
> stored centrally then there could be conflicts when a user changes from
> one machine to another and the configuration data is then out of sync
> with the programs installed on the second machine.
> 

Please excuse me if I am a bit ignorant, but could you clarify by providing a bit more detail. I don't really understand the scenario you are describing?

I have used LDAP for authentication while having the user's home directory still the local directory on the workstation the user logs into, but I am guessing the above also using LDAP  to map the user's home directory via a server NFS share?

Could you use LDAP for authentication only ?  Maybe GIT or rsync scripts to copy user's source code and or documents to/from a central location? Or maybe user LDAP to mount a common folder like "Documents" and not their entire home directory ?

I wonder if the source code that the user is creating will be dependent on the Linux distribution and distribution version that it is being developed on? Or does the source code check the Linux distribution and distribution version and make necessary selections of what code to execute?

I have never managed to successfully manage users in LDAP (other than manually), managing user accounts has always been a pain for me. What is the easiest method?  I understand there is IPA but it seems way too much over head for what seems should be a simple task (add, modify, remove user accounts, manage user access to resources).

I guess I need to research and use LDAP a lot more to really understand...

https://www.cs.wcupa.edu/rkline/linux/ldap-nfs.html
https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/15384.html
https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC1000042685?section=j008
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSDV85_4.2.0/system/ldap_mount_directory_remote.html
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/244137/how-can-i-set-up-centralized-home-directories-and-user-authentication-using-ldap
https://www.lisenet.com/2016/openldap-with-ssl-and-nfs-for-user-home-directories-on-centos-7/



> Does anyone have any ideas on how to handle this ? 
> 
> Brenton
> 
> 
> 
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