The small installations network filesystem and users.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but amidst discussions of pNFS (among other
things) I thought I should bring up something someone said to me: and that
is (to quote him) "using NFS is too hard, I always fail."

I can empathize (although I know better) with this statement.  I've been
using NFS since v2 was a "new thing."  Rick Maclem was the sysadmin at my
University.

So here's the thing.  SMB is easier to implement than NFSv4.  NFSv3 is
easier to implement than v4.  In general, even though I know what is
required, I implement SMB or v3 rather than v4... which means I'm better
off than my friend: he just does without network filesystems.

Back-in-the-day, (1995-ish) I worked for an outfit that released on some 30
odd platforms including VMS.  We had /d/<machine>/<disk> mounted on every
machine.  Besides the fact that power outages were a bit of a nightmare
(many machines didn't recover well if their NFS imports were not yet
ready), This worked well and you could access your home directory on any
machine from any other machine.  The company never really had the money to
have a proper home directory server ... and generally that ended up being
your own workstation... and we worked on satellite imagery ... so disks
were always full... and the backbone was 10Base2...

But just networking 2 FreeBSD boxes' filesystems seems harder than that lot
back then.  Add in a couple linux boxes and something from M$, and you're
into the territory where you just scp files around.

I get the fact that network authentication is hard.  I get that this is the
problem.  I've made 3 or 4 serious runs at LDAP ... but I haven't gotten it
working.  Is it time we (FreeBSD) had a solution that at least worked?
Something ever-so-close-to turnkey?

I've we're looking at the other more complex adoptions (like pNFS and ZFS
and whatnot) ... it would seem that we should ship something that has a
chance of working.