[plug] Network filesystem recommendations?

[Craig Ringer]

> As I recently found out, samba is no good for sharing the home partition 
> because it doesn't support all the options of unixish filesystems, i.e. 
> special files, file permissions, etc etc.  The home path is used to 
> store things like pipes which means it just doesn't work if you try to 
> mount /home/user with smbfs (believe me, I tried ;-))

Actually, if you try with Samba 3.0, enable UNIX extensions, and use the 
'cifs' filesystem code not the old 'smbfs' code, you may well find it 
works quite nicely. I did some quick testing and was fairly impressed, 
but haven't had the chance to look into it more since then.

> Since I implemented exactly what you're talking about with NFS, I've had 
> zero problems.  Just add an entry in /etc/exports for each person's home 
> path and keep the passwords in synch on all the boxes (unless you use a 
> remote login as well of course).

NFS is, unfortunately, horribly insecure. Pseudocode:

$userid = 1;
while ($userid < 65535) {
	getallfiles($userid)
	$userid++
}

In other words, it'll believe you are whoever you say you are, so long 
as the origin port is the right one. That might've mattered once, but 
now that everybody is admin on their own personal computer - pfft.

NFSv4 looks like it might help, but it requires Kerberos. Yay. I'm /so/ 
thrilled. I've never really had the time to look into Kerberos, but it 
looks archaic and ugly at first impressions.

>> Im also going to play with LVM etc, any gotchyas I should keep an eye out
>> for?

I found it remarkably fuss-free and easy. Snapshots are wonderful, and 
it's very nice to be able to allocate a dedicated 20gb volume for some 
temporary scratch space.

Craig Ringer