[clug] Local configuration on a non-homogeneous LAN

[Luke Mewburn]

On 19-06-22 13:38, Brenton Ross via linux wrote:
  | A bit more background of the scenario:
  | The LAN is actually a group of virtual machines, not actual hardware.
  | Similarly, the user is just me, but I am also "virtualised" in that I
  | will be working under different user ids according to the role I am
  | taking - everyday use, development of a project, finance stuff, etc.
  | 
  | The VMs will be using different Linux distributions (and perhaps
  | different releases) as this is necessary to support the applications I
  | want to use. However, for each user I want to be able to access their
  | data files from any of the machines - hence the home directory will be
  | provided via NFS.

Have you considered a variation on how the common data is shared?
Use per-host home directories (local or NAS), and then mounting the
shared directory in a common path, which could be under $HOME but
probably better to be elsewhere.

I.e.,

host1:/home/USER
	local to host, or if you must have NFS homes,
	mounted from nfs:/home-host1/USER

host1:/nfs/common/USER
	mounted from nfs:/home/USER

host2:/home/USER
	local to host, or if you must have NFS homes,
	mounted from nfs:/home-host2/USER

host2:/nfs/common/USER
	mounted from nfs:/home/USER

Users could then just have a convenient symlink from
~/common to /nfs/common/USER (or whatever).

Maintaining common dotfiles to $HOME across the platform can
be done with whatever your favorite tool for that is
(rdist, puppet, ansible, ...). Or just symlink from ~/.something
to /nfs/common/USER/.something.


I've used a variation of this with both NFS and with VirtualBox vboxfs,
with separate home directories per hosts, and also provide easy
access to the majority of the common data in a well known non-$HOME path.

I've found this technique useful. For example, providing easy access to
shared source tree over NAS (NFS, vboxfs, ...), and writing the
(temporary) build artifacts to faster local storage. Of course, this
depends upon "VPATH" or "reachover" support in your build
infrastructure.


cheers,
Luke.