Documents in 2 homes via NFS

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2006-03-26 at 07:56, Thomas Widhalm wrote:

> I have to Linux Distributions on clients within my network. It SuSE 10.0
> and Fedore Core 5. Some users switch from one to another. I mount /home
> from a nfs- server and have nis enabled. As it is no good to mount the
> same home into two differen distributions I made a /home/fc5 directory
> within the nfs- server and make seperat homes for the fc5 users in there
> and mount it as /home on fc5.

It may or may not be a problem to share /home between distributions.
It would depend on the versions of applications involved and
whether their config files were compatible.

> What I need is the directory /home/Documents within the /home/user and
> /home/fc5/user to be in sync. There are few enough users to make a
> solution by hand. I tried a symlink, but unfortunately the clients can't
> follow, because the target isn't mounted on fc5 clients anyway. (link
> was /home/user/Documents to /home/fc5/user/Documents) And I can't
> hardlink a directory.
>
> In short I need a client to follow a link to a directory which is not
> mounted on it, but just available on the server.

You can either mount the /home/fc5 directory on each client so
the symlink will work or use the automounter to mount the
appropriate /home/fc5/user/Documents directory in the
right place on demand.  I'm not sure how Suse handles
automounting, but look at fedora's /etc/auto.master and
/etc/auto.net to see how you can make an access to
/net/servername/path automatically mount it for you,
then make the Documents directory a symlink to the
appropriate /net/host/path.  That way the mount only happens
when someone accesses that directory.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com