[CentOS] home on nfs

Sun Nov 12 13:19:48 UTC 2017
hw <hw at adminart.net>

"Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane, JXVS"
<todd.denniston at navy.mil> writes:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: hw [mailto:hw at adminart.net]
>> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2017 12:02 PM
>> To: CentOS mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] home on nfs
>> 
>> Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> writes:
>> 
>> > On Oct 28, 2017, at 23:15, hw <hw at adminart.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> writes:
>> >>
>> >>>> On Oct 27, 2017, at 10:21, hw <hw at adminart.net> wrote:
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Hi,
>> >>>>
>> >>>> I have the home directory of a user on an nfs server and mount it on a
>> >>>> client.  When the user logs in, they end up in the root directory rather
>> >>>> than in their actual home directory and need to cd into it.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> The user can read and write to their home directory, so it kinda works
>> >>>> fine --- but only kinda.  When the user starts emacs, some of the
>> >>>> settings in ~/.emacs are not applied, but the saved desktop is being
>> >>>> loaded.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Both machines are running Centos 7.4.  What could be wrong with the nfs
>> >>>> mount?
>> >>>
>> >>> Sounds like you haven’t set the selinux Boolean for NFS homedirs.
>> >>> setsebool -P use_nfs_home_dirs 1
>> >>
>> >> Oh, indeed, I didn´t know that I need to do that.
>> >>
>> >> Do I do this on the client or on the server or both?
>> >
>> > Just the client.
>> 
>> Thanks, I tried that and it works now :)
>> 
>
> If you find that the problem comes back in the near future (or perhaps
> check as a preventative), you should look to see if the client machine
> is using the 'soft' mount option instead of 'hard,intr' on the home
> dirs.  A few years ago it took me better than a month to figure out
> that some other admin had (on some machines) thought that using soft
> would cause less waiting on reboots, but we found that the side effect
> on home directories was corrupt data and strange issues on user
> login. (soft can work OK if there is a longish timeout between mount
> request and mount use, but if it is quick like autofs at login, then
> soft falls down.)

Thanks for the warning --- I´ll change it accordingly for just in case.
Corrupted data is bad ...