Paul B. Henson wrote:
> One issue I have is that our previous filesystem, DFS, completely spoiled
> me with its global namespace and location transparency. We had three fairly
> large servers, with the content evenly dispersed among them, but from the
> perspective of the client any user's files were available at
> /dfs/user/<username>, regardless of which physical server they resided on.
> We could even move them around between servers transparently.
This can be solved using an automounter as well. All home directories
are specified as
/nfs/home/user
in the passwd map, then have a homes map that maps
/nfs/home/user -> /nfs/homeXX/user
then have a map that maps
/nfs/homeXX -> serverXX:/export/homeXX
You can have any number of servers serving up any number of homes
filesystems. Moving users between servers means only changing the
mapping in the homes map. The user never knows the difference, only
seeing the homedir as
/nfs/home/user
(we used amd)
> Again though, that would imply two different storage locations visible to
> the clients? I'd really rather avoid that. For example, with our current
> Samba implementation, a user can just connect to
> '\\files.csupomona.edu\<username>' to access their home directory or
> '\\files.csupomona.edu\<groupname>' to access a shared group directory.
> They don't need to worry on which physical server it resides or determine
> what server name to connect to.
Samba can be configured to map homes drives to /nfs/home/%u . Let samba use
the automounter setup and it's just as transparent on the CIFS side.
This is how we had things set up at my previous place of employment and
it worked extremely well. Unfortunately, due to lack of BSD-style quotas
and due to the fact that snapshots counted toward ZFS quota, I decided
against using ZFS for filesystem service -- the automounter setup cannot
mitigate the bunches-of-little-filesystems problem.
Jim
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