Fwd: Re: [plug] mounting home directories

[Craig Ringer]

simon at plumtek.com wrote:

> Are you running X on the laptop? Im pretty sure than some of the window
> managers
> try to create special files in your home directory, which I believe will fail
> with SMB.

I think it may work with the CIFS UNIX extensions in Samba 3.x. Proper 
permissions do, and I think named pipes and sockets are also supported.

> Im not entirely convinced that SMB is useful for this - from my limited
> understanding of it, it will let you access a share as a single user...
> meaning
> that all files appear to be owned by that user/group. Someone can correct me
> here if Im wrong.

I think this was also addressed by the CIFS UNIX extensions.

> Perhaps NFS might be a better way to go - but the problem still exists
> that you
> must either sync your passwd/shadow/group files across the server and the
> laptop, or use some form of centralised authentication (with a fallback to
> local file auth on the laptop if youre unplugged from the network).

Agreed. I use a global LDAP user directory to maintain identical user 
IDs across all my systems (well, except the OpenServer box, which 
doesn't understand pam, ldap, or nss).

Personally, I think the assumption that uid 500 on host1 is the same 
user as uid 500 on host2 is totally retarded. Possibly even worse than 
assuming that user "bob" on host1 the same user as user "bob" on host2. 
I'd love to see protocols negotiate - "does this username/userid pair 
match yours?" so that at least they'd only be seen as the same user if 
their name _and_ ID matched. Then again, there are probably even worse 
flaws with that approach.

The only sane way is to maintain uid/name pairs in sync across all hosts 
that'll be using NFS, etc.

--
Craig Ringer