Roaming User Support - Questions...

[Dr. Juergen Pfennig]

Is there any white-paper on Roaming User Support? If so please tell me. I have 
a number of problems/questions ... For the following text I assume a common 
scenario where some company using KDE would like that all of their users keep 
the "Documents" folder and the "~/.kde" folder on a central server.

PLEASE DON'T TELL ME THAT THE SERVER SHOULD NEVER BE DOWN! That's not 
realistic for small and medium sized shops.

(a) What's the current state - Is there still a lot of work going on or is it 
ready for use?

I have been working with windows for many years at several sites and have seen 
a number of problems that one can have with roaming profiles. Maybe that 
stuff has been discussed amongst KDE developers ... if not here some 
examples. I KNOW THAT SOME OF THEM DO NOT APPLY TO THE CURRENT KDE 
IMPLEMENTATION:

- what if the server is unreachable at login (windows uses locally cached 
copies)
- how do locally cached copies get removed if someone only occasionally works 
on a machine (OK, KDE would store it in /tmp, but see below)
- what if the screen resolutions differ?
- what if software versions differ?
- what if some software is not installed on some machine?
- high network traffic, slow log-in (windows is synchronizing the cache)

(b) In configuration files only differences to the default config are stored. 
But where does the default config come from?

I believe that KConfig merges a system wide default config with the users 
private settings. At least it could do this. An admin could configure site 
specific defaults in the system wide default config.

Is it made sure that KDE does not try to use the local KDE installation to 
obtain the defaults? If it would do this mistake what happens if individual 
machines have different settings in the system wide default config?

Should there be an option to specify that system wide settings can be 
overridden by a server?

(c) What if the server is unreachable (Notebook)?

There is no other way around: there must be a cache! But beware - don't 
introduce windows-like problems as shown in (a).

Currently there is a problem: if I make my .kde a symbolic link to a server 
share and the server is not available (share not mounted) something in KDE 
silently deletes the sym-link and the configuration wizard gets started (see 
startkde script).

Maybe a clever administrator can modify startkde to temporarily use a cached 
copy if .kde is a link and is not valid. In Xreset some script code could run 
tar to backup the latest state of .kde (and maybe the remote default 
settings) ... But couldn't this or something better be made part of the 
official kde release?

If the "Documents" folder is remote but not available some read-only dummy 
folder could be created - just containing a document describing the problem.

In both cases KDE should give a warning message on startup.

(d) What if the server goes down?

Assuming that ".kde" lives on a server ...
Would kde apps hang? How can the user recover from such a desaster?

As you can see some of the smart features of KDE (writing only differences to 
user config files) and not using a configuration cache (Registry) introduce 
their own problems. Any ideas?

Yours Jürgen