Network Home Folders from Linux - how?

[mrjamin]

Anybody got any starting points for getting a small office with 4 macs and network home folders going on? We have a central Linux file/web/database/print server which we'd like to use, mainly because its running with a RAID mirror.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to log into my account from all 4 different macs. Any pointers?

 

[kalisphoenix]

It's a little touchy because OS X doesn't like mounting outside drives into the filesystem. That being said, NFS is in the kernel and all, so it shouldn't be that bad. I had a setup where I had two different /Users/XXXXXX folders, one on my iBook and one on a HD in a USB2 enclosure, and it worked fine.

How far are you into this? Do you need to know theory or just the commands to arrange it? Are you comfortable with Linux, or do you need more-or-less step-by-step instructions?

 

[kalisphoenix]

Something like this should work. Needs to be tightened down for security, though, and only you can do that, knowing your particular situation.

Note that the "insecure" flag is needed to mount NFS shares on OS X

On the Linux box:

/home/adminhome 192.168.2.0/255.255.255.0 (rw,insecure)

And, of course, having an NFS server running is of high importance. Then you need to start the server. It'd probably be good, note, to have HFS/HFS+ support compiled into the kernel of your Linux server, and then make that partition an HFS+ partition so that OS X and its software don't make any assumptions about resource forks, et cetera...

Then you need to mount the directory like you would normally, on one of those computers, by navigating to it in Finder. So when you enter the Terminal, you'll see a directory like /Volumes/192.168.2.1 (or whatever the server's IP address is).

Do this to copy all of the information (including resource forks) in your home directory to the new drive that will be netmounted:

#sudo ditto -v -rsrcFork /Users/you /Volumes/192.168.2.1

And then a simple

192.168.2.1:/home/adminhome /Users/you hfs 0 0

That might work, but I think you might need to use Netinfo to accomplish this. I've heard it go both ways -- it worked fine for me to use /etc/fstab with 10.3, but you never know what might have changed with Tiger. I'm unsure of how you'd use Netinfo to accomplish this, never having mucked with it much myself.

Anyway -- that should work, and if the permissions are right, it should be secure from the average slob. It's probably not good for an untrusted environment, though.

I apologize if you already know this stuff and are, for instance, just asking advice about whether or not it's a good idea. I'm sure it's not a good solution, but it hopefully answers your question.

 

[kalisphoenix]

Come to think of it, you might want to look into using Samba instead of this. I use NFS habitually, but those in the know seem to think NFS is a pile of ****. And come to think of it, OS X probably has some sort of solution in Netinfo for AFP'ing or SMB'ing home directories from a server that doesn't involve this UNIX muck. So ignore me.