Thoughts for the meeting

[Robert Meyer]

--- Robert Dege <rdege at cse.Buffalo.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 
> > Cool idea.  I had thought of the concept of dinking with nsswitch.conf to
> look
> > in NIS, then files.  Then you could use your NFS home directory when you
> were
> 
> This is bad.  Ever have NFS & amd sit there waiting for a network
> connection to bcome active?  Not a pretty site.  As soon as you login....
> you wait basically forever.

You didn't read the rest of the post.  I said that the nsswitch.conf has nis
and files.  If NIS isn't active, it will look in the local password file.  The
local password file points to the LOCAL home directory on the laptop.  The NIS
password entry points to the NETWORK home directory.  The rest is just trying
to sync up a directory and some dot files when the network login occurs.
 
> This also applies to querying DNS before /etc/hosts
> Damn that localhost!
Yeah, I always wind up dinking nsswitch.conf on non-networked machines

> 
> :)
> 
> > I figger that if we put our heads together, maybe we can come up with
> something
> > that we could publish to the world 'cuz I'm sure that we're not the only
> ones
> > thinking about this problem.
> 
> I think I need a better understanding of what we're looking to solve.
> Especially from John's view.  Going through all these speculations, I
> completely forgot what we're trying to achieve.  A network $HOME?  A
> network folder in $HOME?  I've got the network/stand alone bit though.

Well, what we're trying to do is make a truly mobile laptop environment where a
user can benefit from larger data stores, backups and networked services when
he's connected to the company network but not be hampered completely when he's
not.  Take the example of the travelling salesman:  He goes on the road, writes
proposals, etc. and then eventually winds up back at his office.  He wants his
files backed up, to get new stuff from the company file system, etc.

This can typically be done in windows (although the concept of a home directory
eludes most companies) since windows falls back to the cached credental set on
the local hard drive.  There is a briefcase on the machine that can by synced
to a similar folder on the network when the machine is connected.  The problem
with most windows machines is that noone typcally backs up the C: drive on the
machines or any other local drive since the machines are typically never
available on the network with any kind of predictability.

So this begs the question: "How can we do this in Linux (or any other Unix)?"

> 
> But to continue on the thread, you can always tar, then rdist, then untar.
> Run a cron job to detect network connectivity, or the specific host, yadda
> yadda yadda.
> 

I thought about the concept of cron jobs but there is no way to be sure that
you'll back them all up at any time.  That's why the actual backup task HAS to
be initiated from the laptop.  I kinda like the 'rdist' method.  It's primarily
a network syncronization process to a server (or peer).  We need to come up
with a way to do a similar sync from NFS on the local machine...  Wait a
minute, if the laptop can jab a daemon on the server when it is connected (or
the user logs in), the server can connect back to do an 'rdist' of his
pertinant files.  Gotta build in stuff to keep things like the Netscape cache
from being copied but still get the prefs, bookmarks, etc.  Probably with some
kind of exclude clause.  Actually, we'd have to have something that always
watched the user's network home when the machine was connected to make sure
that anything in the 'Briefcase' or the dot files that changed would
automatically get copied to the laptop's local directory since the
logout/shutdown process wouldn't necessarily be predicable and the user
wouldn't want to sit and wait for a sync when he was trying to get out the
door.

There, more food for discussion.  Any ideas, flames, cheers? :-)

Bob

=====
Bob Meyer
Knightwing Communications, Inc.
36 Cayuga Blvd
Depew, NY 14043
Phone: 716-308-8931 or 716-681-0076
Meyer_RM at Yahoo.com

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