Roaming User Support - Questions...

[Matthias Welwarsky]

On Wednesday 04 February 2004 08:27, Bo Thorsen wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 February 2004 18:58, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> > On Tue February 3 2004 18:31, Dr. Juergen Pfennig wrote:
> > > Is there any white-paper on Roaming User Support?
> >
> > KDE does not have specific support for roaming users beyond mounting
> > the same remote $HOME.
>
> Which is a problem for some applications - kicker and kdesktop being the
> most annoying of them.

Well, it's not an application level problem, and it's not a problem of small/
medium sized shops, it's an overall linux problem. KDE might be affected, but 
it's only one of many. Just some hints:

Two years ago I was doing a workshop for IT managers of a _big_ german company 
(think: 14.000 desktops) introducing them to linux (and KDE) and one of the 
biggest concerns was, that they could not go with NFS mounted $HOME because 
it's near impossible with linux to failover a NFS server. And servers _will_ 
fail, no matter how hard you try, even if for a scheduled downtime. Yet, they 
of course wanted roaming profiles because they had it on Windows NT.

So talking about NFS it's true that you should basically forget about it if 
you have more than say 50+ clients and cannot stand downtime of a server. NFS 
mounted $HOME (or even application installations) is a big no-no there. If it 
was just a random file server failing, it's not a problem if the users still 
have their mail and office programs so that they're able to do basic work. 
But the desktop freezing complete - oh boy, they will go ballistic.

While it's true that this is not a problem of KDE, it'd be nice if KDE could 
provide a solution. I know that roaming profiles in Windows is nothing more 
than a download at login and an upload at logout time, so it wouldn't really 
be difficult to do the same with a simple rsync-like KDE tool. A full blown 
ActiveDirectory clone is of course a bit out of scope, but I predict that 
Novell is going to feature something like it for linux on the long run.

regards,
	matze

-- 
Matthias Welwarsky
Fachschaft Informatik FH Darmstadt
Email: matze at stud.fbi.fh-darmstadt.de

"all software sucks equally, but some software is more equal"
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