Laptops, centralized authentication, and "roaming profiles"

[Tony Shadwick]

On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Henry Miller wrote:

>
>
> On 6/8/2005 at 10:13 Tony Shadwick wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Henry Miller 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. :\
>
> Can you setup subversion or some other.   As a programmer I don't
> backup my home directory at work because all my important work is kept
> in CVS anyway.
> (or it is a work in progress from today, and wouldn't be on a backup
> if there was a crash)  The CVS server is backed up, and I check in
> often.
>
> Teaching management to use it will be hard.  However if yours are among
> those [few] who get it, they will love you for giving it too them.  MS
> Word doesn't allow diffs against documents, but perhaps you can teach
> subversion to diff OpenOffice.org (or whatever you use) files.
>
> It is a long shot, but it solves your problems, and although more work
> is also a net gain.
>
> I suppose I should give a plug for the company I work for as well:
> Our rocketVault with continuous backups (basically rsync) can backup
> your laptops when they are in the office.  Since most laptop uses don't
> roam between machines they don't need the shared home directory so much
> as a backup.   It is a completely different solution than the one you
> are thinking of, but it might solve the laptop problem good enough, and
> let you worry about other issues.   (www.intradyn.com)
>
>
Thanks, I don't mind the plug either.  I'm working out and documenting 
solutions to these types of issues right now.  It is still just 
theoretical, adn not an actual customer need, but I see it going that 
direction as soon as I try to implement it in a live environment.

Do you guys have your software in the ports tree for easy installation? :)