Hey,
I’m tired of my configuration going out of sync between my computers and doing something like keeping my entire homedir in git or svn just doesn’t work for me. I’d like to have a single home directory on my file server that I mount on all my computers.
What’s the best way to do this? I know I could use NIS, but that seems like a pretty heavyweight solution for home use. I did some cursory web searching but didn’t see anything useful; before I do deep spelunking I figured I’d ask here to see if someone else has already got this figured out.
Thanks,
Nathan
NFS, I suppose. Should work as any other share, taking care that the fstab entry is automounted, not soft and the id’s match.
see man exports, man mount and man nfs.
Try posting in the networking fora, someone more knowledgeable may help.
NFS for things where having 1 copy is important, it’s very easy to set up with YaST, try a simple shared directory first, till you’re confident of it.
You can use rsync(1) to replicate directories efficiently (hint -essh) so you can push, or pull out changes at regular intervals. It should actually handle, copying newer files back to with changes on many boxen (synchronise time with NTP first), though that’ll make deletion of files difficult (it’d look like a new file to boxes which have it and they’ld re-copy it back).
The only gotcha with sharing the home directory, is if you put a major program update, it is quite possible a conversion is done on your files to a new format, without it being possible to go back on boxes with older software.
Thanks for the advice, brunomcl and robopensuse. I was thinking that I would have to use a heavyweight solution like NIS so that file ownership wasn’t awkward, but I guess if I make sure my user has the same uid/gid on all systems I can just go the NFS approach.
FWIW I already use rsync to back up my homedir every night, so that won’t change…
Nathan