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

Used an online service instead

[kriston]

Even at home, not just at work, I use several computers. I tried having a "mobile home" various ways, like the pathetic Netscape Roaming Profiles. I ended up settled on just using Yahoo to handle all my mail ("mail plus" product), address book, notepad, and file storage ("briefcase" product). I determined that all I really needed everywhere was the administrative office-keeping stuff (mail) and some files to download (briefcase). All the software development and systems administration stuff that had to be kept locally on a machine turned out to be very few things: a few dot-files (.emacs, .kermrc, .profile) and copy of Emacs 19.34b built to work from $HOME directory. I keep those files in Yahoo Briefcase.

Another alternative is to use a hosting provider and access your files remotely from there--same results as using Yahoo but doesn't require a web browser

Kris

VNC?

[Gudlyf]

I know of many people (including myself) who set their "real" working environment on one system running a VNC server, then connect to that from home, the road, etc. via SSH. Not the fastest solution, but it works.

Then if you're really ambitious, build a VNC client for all of the OS's you'll be working on and put them on a CD for portability.