Roaming User Support - Questions...

[Waldo Bastian]

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On Wed February 4 2004 09:37, Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
> 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. 

I have put up a rough design idea for something like that on 
http://www.suse.de/~bastian/kprivilege/kprivilege.html

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SUSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com
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