automount experience needed

[Scott R. Presnell]

tohanson at gonzo.lerc.nasa.gov (Jeff Hanson) writes:

>I administer 9 workstations with about 100 users.  Each user has an
>account on one machine and the other machines are nfs mounted.  I would
>like to use automount but I have not been able to figure out how.
>If anyone in a similar situation has experience with automount I would
>appreciate the help.

I am personally responsible for only five machines, however, we are part of
a very large network of iri and sparcs.  This is the way I have it set up.

I have set up the "real" home directories to be /usr/<machine>/<user> on
those machines that have home directories (two of the five).  Other
administrators for the iri around here have done the same thing.  The
sparcs already have the homes under /home. 

I made /home the toplevel indirect mount point for the home directories on
our iri.  The passwd entries for home areas look like
/home/<machine>/<user>.  I'm not sure about "automount" but "amd" can be
set up with conditionals.  So lets say my "real" home is in /usr/A/srp, my
passwd entry is /home/A/srp

If I logon to host "B", "amd" mounts the /usr/A partition in a work area,
and makes a link from /home/A to /usr/A

if I logon to host "A", "amd" realizes that it is the localhost, and
simply makes a link from /home/A to /usr/A (no mounts needed).

On each class of machine around here each person has only one home.  So in
the future I will probably "generalize" this to

/home/iris/<user>
/home/sun/<user>
/home/mips/<user> ...you get the idea.  

though another layer of links in the maps, rather than being dependent on
the hostname in the path.  

There *are* some gotchas...  For instance, if you use the iconic login
facility, each time you logout, pandora looks to everyone's home directory
for an icon to display (even if you specify in the /etc/passwd.sgi file
that these people will not have an icon displayed - I put in a SCR on that)
... can you say "mount storm" ?  

Also the pwd display in your prompt will be ugly.  

Its hard to talk about without showing you the map file.  I can send you
example map files.

	Hope this helps.

	- Scott

--
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