[ILUG] NIS and NFS, the story continues..

[Lars Hecking]

Donncha O Caoimh writes:
> Got NIS working, with shadow passwords too, and now looking at sharing
> home directories among machines.
> The simplest way I can think of is to export the whole /home tree and
> mount it on /home on foreign machines, but this could be a lot more
> expensive than I'd like. I tried to get my head around autofs and amd
> but I couldn't find any clear "do this on the server" and "do this on
> the client" docs to get that lot working. Would I have to have a
> seperate line in /etc/exports on the server for each home directory? 

 /etc/exports defines which filesystems a machine exports (client).
 Of course, the confusing part is that the NIS server can have a
 /etc/exports file to export fs's to other machines.

 On the server, all export client filesystems are listed in /etc/auto.home.

 /etc/auto.master on the clients is normally used (on Linux) to define
 the mount points and the maps which to use. E.g., to automount all
 auto.home maps exported by the NIS server in /net,

 /net    yp:auto.home

 I'd recommend to use autofs instead of amd. Haven't tried amd since the
 old RH 5.0/5.1 days, but it was fairly unusable back then.