Roaming User Support - Questions...

[Thiago Macieira]

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

If ~/.kde is on a central NFS mount, I'm sorry to say, but the server 
HAS to be up at all times. If it's not, the whole client system freezes 
upon access to any unreachable file, be it KDE or no.

If it's not realistic for small companies, they'll have to adapt. How 
hard is it to let one server running?

>- what if the server is unreachable at login (windows uses locally
> cached copies)

On an NFS mount, the user will have no $HOME. Therefore, either the 
login will fail, or no settings will be stored -- with a variety of 
bizarre problems considering creation of ~/.kde will fail.

That said, I've never tested. This is only me making assumptions.

>- 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)

Locally-cached = /tmp and /var/tmp. It's only about temporary files.

>- what if the screen resolutions differ?

It shouldn't matter much, except for, maybe, wallpapers and window 
positions. Aside from that, I don't think it would be an usability 
problem.

>- what if software versions differ?

If you run a newer KDE on top of old configuration files, it might 
upgrade them. That means the old KDE will find newer settings that it 
may or may not understand.

In all, better to keep to one same version.

>- what if some software is not installed on some machine?

Judging by my KDE rebuilds when I forget a software or another, it won't 
matter much.

For instance, I had JuK on auto-started due to session restoration. On a 
build I did, I forgot taglib and so JuK wasn't built or installed. When 
I logged back on, there were no error messages that juk was missing.

>- high network traffic, slow log-in (windows is synchronizing the
> cache)

There is no cache. Maybe there's a ksycoca rebuild, but that shouldn't 
matter much.

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

$KDEDIRS. If you have different master configurations, the merged 
configurations will differ too. That includes Kiosk-mode immutables as 
well.

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

Kiosk-mode immutables can't be overriden. Everything else can.

>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?

That might be interesting. But note that that applies only to KDE 
applications.

>(d) What if the server goes down?
>
>Assuming that ".kde" lives on a server ...

NFS server?

>Would kde apps hang? 

Yes. Any app accessing an unavailable NFS-mounted file would hang.

>How can the user recover from such a desaster? 

Turn the NFS server back on.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  Registered Linux user #65028
   thiagom (AT) mail (dot) com
    ICQ UIN: 1967141   PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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