Laptops, centralized authentication, and "roaming profiles"

[Charles Swiger]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 11:13 AM, Tony Shadwick wrote:
> Oooh....good call on the vpn.  Set it up to where they have a local  
> user, and local home directory, vpn in.  Okay, so now I'm on the  
> network, presuming the pptp server was authing against OpenLDAP or  
> NIS.  Add a script to that login that mounts any NFS shares, and  
> quite possibly does a quick rsync against a server to back up the  
> home directory.  Problem is, if they didn't "nicely" disconnect,  
> then we don't know who's copy needs to be updated, the local copy  
> or the remote copy. :\

If you're going to be updating two trees of stuff not always in sync,  
a version control system like CVS or SVN might be worth considering.   
Used carefully, rsync will also deal with this pretty well, but you  
would be wise to have known-good backups before trusting rsync -- 
delete to merge.

> I'll look into Andrew's File System.  That's a bit of a misnomer on  
> the acronym though.  AFS seems to be more commonly known as "Apple  
> File Sharing" protocol.  Yay...

Nowadays, that's true.  However, CMU was using AFS before Apple sold  
computers which could do ethernet, and it's quite possible that  
Andrew even predates the introduction of the original 128k Macs.

It's "Andrew File System", BTW, no possessive: named after Andrew  
Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, who are the "C" and "M" from where the  
system was developed.  :-)

-- 
-Chuck