Roaming User Support - Questions...

[Jason Keirstead]

On February 03, 2004 2:38 pm, Dr. Juergen Pfennig wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 February 2004 19:04, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > If ~/.kde is on a central NFS mount
>
> Oh! About 95% of all network shares on this planet are smb (or novell) NFS
> is completely exotic because only very few computers have drivers for it
> (mostly UNIX or Linux but their market share is only <= 2%). So sorry - but
> NFS is meaningless and we should forget it!

The file system of the mounted $HOME is irrelevant. It could be NFS, SMB, 
SSHFS, or any other network filesystem. If it is not mounted or the server is 
down when you log in, youare going to have no $HOME and you will have a 
number of bizarre UNIX errors way before you get anywhere near starting KDE.

> Why do so many KDE developers restrict their view of the world to Linux? In
> the real world most users of Linux/KDE will be "guests" in an
> infrastructure that is designed for Windows.

The infrastructure does not matter. It is beyond belief that any network admin 
would *design* their network around the fact that the central file server 
will constantly be going up or down.

I guess maybe this is a Windows NT admin thing.

> Do you really want to confine 
> KDE/Linux to a windows-free ghetto?

Ideally, yes. Except s/ghetto/paradise :P

> > >Would kde apps hang?
>
> That's the point. KDE needs to cache the config files locally. 

You're placing filesystem level jobs on KDE.

To do what you suggest, what you would have is a login script that does the 
following:

a) Logs into the Windows LAN via Active Directory w/ Samba
ib)  If a succeeded, Use Samba to copy the contents of their $HOME on the 
server to /home/<user> locally

c) Mount the server $HOME on /home/<user>
d) Start KDE.

This way if a or b fail, you have a local copy of $HOME.

In conclusion: None of this is the job of KDE. It is a layer down. If the user
has no $HOME at login, this is not a KDE problem.. it is a much graver 
problem.

-- 
There's no place like 127.0.0.1

http://www.keirstead.org