Building a Better 'Mobile $HOME'?

numbski asks: "As a systems administrator, I find myself moving from machine to machine to machine on a daily basis. I happen to be a FreeBSD/MacOS X nut, so on a given day I move from my 17" iMac at home, to my 12" Powerbook at work, to any one of my 16 FreeBSD Servers. That's not to mention any of the Win2k Servers that have Cygwin loaded. All of that said, there is a longing in me to have a simple $HOME that all of my systems use and understand. I've considered the Knoppix way of dealing with this problem using a USB key device from this previous Slashdot article, however I don't know how many systems I could get away with consistently having my USB device picked up and used correctly without scripting changes to fstab, not to mention the issue of choosing a filesystem that just about every OS will recognize: FAT32. Windows is going to be unhappy no matter what I'm afraid, as it doesn't understand symlinking. c:\Documents and Settings\$USER can't just be moved off to another volume. The one glimmer of hope I have is this article on ftpfs and webdavfs. Using these one should be able to set up a single, persistent home that follows you from machine to machine over the internet. I guess I would like to know how others have gone about setting up a mobile $HOME. I look forward to having all of my preferences, dotfiles, and bookmarks follow me around."

Comments

No good answer

[Phexro]

Unfortunately, you have two issues to deal with. First and foremost is simply getting access to your data, and the second (and harder) is making that data usable to whatever os/apps you may be using.

For example, I use Konqueror on my Linux box(en), but use Mozilla on Mac OS X. How do you get bookmarks from one browser to work on the other?

As for the first problem, NFS works enough for LANs, but I sure wouldn't want to use it over the public 'net.

Coda seems promising, but I've never found a distro that actually supports it, and there's a fair amount of manual stuff you have to do to use it. I've never managed to get it working properly, but from what I understand, it's somewhat similar to CVS in that you have to update/commit. This has the advantage of working when disconnected.

InterMezzo also has some promise, but I haven't played with it as of yet.

USB keys seem like a better idea, until you realize that if you lose the little sucker, you're SOL. So, keep backups. Also, I keep a ridiculous amount of stuff in my home directory - multiple GBs - so being able to move a few hundred MB at a time just doesn't work for me.

Have a macro create it on each system.

[WGR]

Why should $HOME be the same on each system. Why not have a expression in .login or Windows login.bat create a value that points to the Home location on each machine?
For example on a Windows XP machine your login profile script would do
set HOME="%HOMEDRIVE%\%HOMEPATH%"

in Cygwin it would be
export HOME="$HOMEDRIVE/$HOMEPATH"

etc. depending on the OS.
So you would use $HOME (or %HOME% in Windows) whenever you wanted the home location.

My incarnation

[Jahf]

I'm about to implement a mobile $HOME at my home ... my plan is to use a main server to store the data. I'm plannint to use the Intermezzo fs for my laptops so that they can run connected to the network or not (Intermezzo caches data, so I can take my laptop on the road, continue to work on documents, and when I plug back into my home network it will populate my edits back to the server). For these machines and my linux desktop I'm planning to roam everything in $HOME so that I have a single install of custom fonts, Star Office, mozilla settings, etc.

However, I'm giving up on having a roaming desktop between Windows boxes and my wife's iMac. For those I'm just using Samba / Netatalk to link to the documents and bookmark files but not roaming anything else. It's just not worth the hassle for me to try and make those systems any more portable.

I did consider using the Unison service to do synchronization between Windows and Linux, but I think I'm happier with Intermezzo since I can afford the dedicated partition space on the Linux machines. I really do wish that Intermezzo could support the sharing of individual files, but then it would just be a synchronizer, not a filesystem.

Here's what I do - not very elegant

[leehwtsohg]

As was pointed out already, there are two problems here - one is having a universally readable piece of hardware, and the other is how to keep configuration across different systems.
I solve the 2nd problem by having 2 directories, called .laptop and .desktop
and a directory called .cur_dot that is linked on my laptop to .laptop, and on the desktop - .desktop (!) .kde is linked to .cur_dot/.kde
dot files that need to be the same on both systems sit in .common_dot, and are linked correctly. So .tcshrc is linked to .common_dot/.tcshrc
If I really wanted, I could trace down the various bookmark and cache files in .kde and place some of them in .common_dot.
I can thus rsync my home directory easily, just taking care not to overwrite .cur_dot
This can easily be extended to cover several systems. I wrote a couple of things to make life easier, but overall it is quite a pain to keep track of every new dot file that a program generates....

I'm working on something like that

[BroadbandBradley]

but it's not a total solution.
What I want to do is base it around Mozilla.
The Plan is to keep the profile directory on a website, and use Mozilla Roaming profiles to log in from different machines.(doesn't work yet) If there's files I need I'll keep them in the profile directory. If all your machines are connected, and all your tools are browser based, then that's all you'd need.
Here's to hoping that I can get ZillaVilla.com up and running sometime this century. if anyone has any feedback, contributions, Ideas, insight, whatever, don't hesitate to send them my way via ZillaVilla.com/forum

CVS

[DrewFish]

I keep the inportant bits of my system in a CVS repository. It's not the most elegant, as it requires some work to "stitch" the checked out directory into all the places programs look for configuration info.

Plusses: tolerant of transient network trouble; can keep per-machine mods (just don't check them in); one universal distributed set of vim tweaks, yeah!

Minuses: each ~/.config file symlinked into the directory (ugg); per-machine mods requires a bit of a CVS dance sometimes; most probably unix-only

A big caveat with this is that I've only used it with two systems, both running the same version of the same distro. So, umm..., there are most likely complications abound.

Re:Symlinking not needed

[stubear]

Not only that but you can change the user's home folder through the User Properties in the MMC. You can set a local path or a path on a connected network drive.