[plug] AutoFS talk

[Andrew Cooks]

Hi

Thanks to Ian for the AutoFS talk. It brought back some old memories, but I
had to catch the last bus home and didn't get a chance to share my
experience.

One potential use case for hundreds of dynamic mounts is to backup hundreds
of user workstations. Perhaps it's not a very good idea and there are more
sophisticated solutions today, but in 2002 It Seemed Like a Good Plan(TM).

When the staff started getting laptops, having their home directories on a
central server exported over NFS didn't work well anymore and we moved to
local home directories. To backup the local home directories, each box
would export /home as read-only to a backup server. It seemed simpler and
safer than rsync (the other option at the time) over ssh. Hundreds of ssh
servers on dynamic IP addresses (and hostnames) had the potential for a key
management nightmare. One could grab a list of machines from LDAP or dhcp
leases or NIS and create a map file from that, but I'd feel less
comfortable with cleaning up the known_hosts file all the time.

Another use case we had (not involving hundreds of autofs maps) was for
thousands of home directories on a central NFS server, where we needed to
prevent any user from reading another user's data, with or without the
other user's knowledge or cooperation. (think practical exams) So, we had
each user's home directory mounted at whatever PC he logs in from after
(s)he'd authenticated, and unmounted when (s)he logged out, so that the
user couldn't do 'chmod 777 ~'  and share his code with his buddy.

That's about 8 years ago, so I can't recall all the detail. The scarring
from the academic side of my uni experience sometimes prevents me from
remembering the good stuff, so thanks for reminding me.

Cheers,
Andrew
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