On Oct 15, 2008, at 9:51 AM, "Filipe Brandenburger" <filbranden at gmail.com > wrote: > Hi, > > On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 06:05, Laurent Wandrebeck > <l.wandrebeck at gmail.com> wrote: >> 2008/10/15 Ian Forde <ian at duckland.org>: >>> Without knowing more specifics, you could always try using the /net >>> automount... as in: /net/servername/data >>> >>> It's ugly, and rarely used, but it works for small networks... >> >> automount could do the trick, but it's ugly, as you said :) > > automount is not ugly, what is ugly is to use paths that include the > name of the server, in that if you change the server name the path of > the files will change. This is also ugly because you end up having > cross-mounts, in which machine A mounts a volume from machine B and > machine B mounts a volume from machine A, so when you want to shut > them down they may hang one waiting for the other one to come up (and > with fstab instead of automount, you have the same problem when you > boot up). Try to write your own auto mount maps that mount to descriptive mount points rather than server names: /archive/00, /archive/01... > > automount is actually quite a good tool if you really need to do this > kind of stuff, which in your case you will probably have to anyway. > The setup with automount is actually good in that volumes will be kept > mounted only while they're used (if you use a short enough timeout), > and in your case it seems that they will be seldomly used, so you > would not have NFS mounted filesystems most of the time. > > I sure recommend you to move from NIS to LDAP, for your network size > OpenLDAP should be good enough, but you may want to look into a > Directory Server if you want something more robust (although it will > be harder to set up). When you implement LDAP, make sure you implement > it over SSL if you don't want your passwords going unencrypted over > the network, or use LDAP for user information only and Kerberos for > authentication. If all your doing is serving up mount maps or netgroups then ldap is over kill, definitely don't put passwords in nis (or ldap) use kerberos for those. A small user base can be handled more easily via nis then ldap you don't need to put passwords in passwd use kerberos for those. > > NFSv3 -> NFSv4 also looks good, but I would say this tends to be a > more risky upgrade, since NFS3 is quite stable and NFS4 is still > somewhat new and you may end up having some surprises with it. > Personally I will still stick with NFSv3 for a while. For best interoperability use v3. -Ross