Laptops, centralized authentication, and "roaming profiles"

[Tony Shadwick]

On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Charles Swiger wrote:

> 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

Yeah, I didn't mean Apple had first dibbs, I'm just saying waking up to 
your random tech, and regard to file storage, you say "AFS", 9 times out 
of 10 they'll think you're talking about Apple File Sharing. :)

I'm seriously going to look into that.  Version control would be awesome 
if I could script it and not have the user needing to mess with too many 
command line switches and such, and I agree, they would love me for it. 
The trick is that in most companies, the laptop users are the VIP's.  The 
people that decide if you still get money from them or not. :OP  So yes, 
they would love the benefits of being able to roll back a file to an older 
version if they screwed up, but these same people are usually the ones 
that want the least hassle with using the computer.

All of the toys, but none of responsibilities or pitfalls for having said 
toys.  Gotta love it. :\