sharing home directories and user accounts.

CloudBolt

A friend of mine and myself have got a server at school, running gentoo linux, and 4 identical clients running gentoo as well. I'd like centralised user accounts, so that anyone, provided they have an account, can login on any of the clients. the /home directories have to be stored on the server, with a per-user storage limit of about 20 MB (probably only text files need to be stored, and other files can be stored on USB drives). Also, we need the 4 clients to be not only identical in terms of hardware, but software as well, meaning if we emerge one package it will be copied to the other clients so that we won't need to emerge it again. We thought about just emerging with -buildpkg, sharing /usr/portage/distfiles on the server and writing a startup script that would emerge everything we just emerged on the other clients.

Can anyone give us advice or a guide on setting up user account sharing, directory sharing and keeping the packages synced? Thanks in advance.
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Rob1n · Posted: Tue Aug 21, 2007 2:48 pm Post subject:

The usual solution here is NFS and NIS (though LDAP is also an option here) - unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any official gentoo documentation on either of these though. However, the wiki gives us:

You may also want to think about running the clients as diskless systems (or mostly diskless anyway, keep temporary files local but centralise everything else) which will simplify maintenance.

Napalm Llama · Guru Joined: 04 Jun 2005 Posts: 533 Location: Cardiff, UK

Diskless systems do sound like the way to go in this case. I would advise netbooting - have a the clients' root directory on the server, exported via NFS, and have the clients mount that when they boot. That way you can be sure that every client is identical. The kernel is retrieved by the BIOS via TFTP. There are various tutorials for how to do this.

I think you'll still need the central user management system though - although I'm not sure about that, I've never really experimented with that kind of thing...
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