nfs mount for /home (or /mnt/nfs/home)

[tucansam]

Gang,

 

My kids' XP machine finally died, and the Windows 7 licensing sucks, and I won't be going to Windows 8.1.  So I am exploring Ubuntu, Mint, and #! as a replacement OS.

 

My biggest concern right now is that everyone's "My Documents" share under Windows maps to a share on my unraid server, so files are not stored locally and can be accessed from any machine they log into.

 

I'm wondering about the permissions when doing this from inside linux.  Its been a long, long, long time since I set up a multi-user *nix system, and have never done it under linux.

 

Unraid server is presently exporting cifs and nfs -- wondering if I can get some advice on how to do this from a new linux desktop, with regard to permissions.  Mapping a drive in Windows XP was a breeze and permissions were never an issue.  I don't want to spend a day troubleshooting, they will need this system to be up when school starts up again.

 

Thanks.

[bkasten]

Tucansam, it can be done, and permissions are not really an issue.

 

I have a similar set-up (remote shared folders), almost all the workstations in my house are Linux.

 

The thing I found is, I cannot successfully mount the whole /home folder. Well, I can, but the mounting is too slow! The computer boots way too fast, and starts writing/reading from the local mount point, and then mounts the remote folder over the top.

 

What I have done instead is to mount the large folders folders within the home folder. That is, Document, Downloads, Videos, etc. On the local machine, the fstab(s) look like this:

 

psalms.local:/mnt/disk1/Videos /home/bkasten/Videos nfs defaults,nolock 0 0

psalms.local:/mnt/disk1/iTunes /home/bkasten/Music nfs defaults,nolock 0 0

psalms.local:/mnt/disk1/Pictures /home/bkasten/Pictures nfs defaults,nolock 0 0

psalms.local:/mnt/disk1/Documentsb /home/bkasten/Documents nfs defaults,nolock 0 0

psalms.local:/mnt/disk1/Downloads /home/bkasten/Downloads nfs defaults,nolock 0 0

 

On the unRAID server, I have shares that correspond to the local folder names. That is Videos = Videos, iTunes = Music, Pictures = Pictures, etc. These are then all the same (shared) on all my workstations. There is an exception in my system, I have separate shares for Documents, so that users can have a separate Documents are to themselves. You can have one large shared Documents folder, that's up to you.

 

I found this to be the best solution for my network. Besides, you really don't want all the /home files remotely. Linux puts a lot of settings files personal to the users in /home/usename, and you most likely don't want all that shared anyway.

 

I found that I like this system, having shared filesystems for the common shares across the network.

 

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

 

bkasten