On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 08:45:05PM -0400, Alfred von Campe wrote:
We use NIS (ypbind) and Kerberos at work for all our Linux and Unix systems. Home directories are mounted via autofs from an NIS map. Everything works just fine as long as all network resources are available (however, things turn ugly when the NIS servers are not reachable).
Yes, NIS and autofs/NFS are usefull, but only in a fully connected environment.
What are other strategies that you use to deal with off-network use in an NIS environment?
I would suggest you configure their laptops outside of your NIS/autofs/NFS environment, create them specific accounts on the laptops, and make them use replication of their office home directories and resources on the laptop with Unison [1] (and ssh as a transport). This way, before they gome home/outside, they replicate from office to laptop their files; when they go back to office, they push back the modifications.
In my lab, this stragegy works well since years.
[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/