[CentOS] Laptop and NFS homedir

Wed Aug 26 14:51:31 UTC 2020
Patrick Bégou <Patrick.Begou at legi.grenoble-inp.fr>

In my professional environment, user's laptop have small (but fast ;-))
storage and a local home directory (centOS7).
They use sshfs to reach a central storage for most of their needs. This
central storage is secured (ceph replication + daily backup).
It works also from home but, of course, with lower performances behind
an ADSL box.
No problem with closing connections.

Patrick

Le 26/08/2020 à 15:08, Jonathan Billings a écrit :
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 12:08:56PM +0100, isdtor wrote:
>> Are there any documented best practices for using NFS home
>> directories on laptops? Right now, and this is on CentOS 7, when I
>> disconnect the machine from the network, the desktop freezes, and I
>> can't even tell if the machine switches to the wireless network. If
>> this sort of adapter switching, which is standard in e.g. Windows
>> 10, is even supported. 
> I'd say: Don't do it.
>
> NFS does not handle disconnected operations well, nor does the client
> handle IP migrations well.  You'd have to restart the client to get it
> to work, most likely, and processes that are living in $HOME would
> need to be killed before you could unmount it.
>
> There is some effort being made in making fscache work with NFS but
> I've not had much luck in CentOS7 or 8.  It still wouldn't help with
> IP roaming.
>
> Best advice I can offer is to make $HOME local but have symlinks into
> NFS for directories that can be safely unmounted and remounted.
>
> Windows doesn't really have network home directories like UNIX does,
> and their SMB client handles IP roaming better.
>