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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."
An alternative to a true distributed filesystem is Unison , a user-space daemon that keeps filesystems automagically synced using rsync. I have not used it myself, but I saw reference to it nested somewhere in here and thought it looked interesting.
1) In Win2K...
/etc/fstab file to recognize but not automagically mount /mnt/dongle (noauto), then configure your automounter to mount it when you access it. Make sure you add support for umass under FreeBSD, and usb-storage in Linux. Then, set up an auto.home NIS map and again use your favorite automounter to map /home/yourname to /mnt/dongle.
Change the Logon path for yourself... run
mmc.exe %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\lusrmgr.msc
And find yourself, go to properties, then profile, then set the Logon path to the drive letter (and perhaps a safety-subfolder) that contains your user profile when the USB key is attached. AFAIK it supports UDF filesystems on zip-like things as well (you may need UDF tools like DirectCD if it doesn't work)
2) In Unix...
In FreeBSD and Linux, you should be able to create and write to UDF filesystems on anything that looks like a SCSI device (IE a USB flash disk). And OSX 10.1 is UDF-ready for reading and writing on arbitrary devices (incl. usb hard disks/flash disks). Set up your
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm doing exactly what you're talking about using CVS.
.xyz binary files trying to do linefeed conversion, just because you forgot to tell it otherwise.
Everything I care about lives in huge CVS project, currently hosted on a laptop. In my case, this comes to 7GB, mostly in my photo gallery.
For servers (Solaris) at work, everything shares one NFS mounted home directory, which has a checkout of everything but my photos (due to quota limits). My personal work machine (Win2k, yuck) has its own complete checkout, with a few partial checkouts to put configuration files where different programs want them. My home machine (OS X) has a complete checkout.
This setup works for everything except bookmarks, where I find myself using IE on Windows, Netscape in Unix, and Safari on OS X. For bookmarks, I've moved to the "My Yahoo" service, which keeps everything online and accessable with one click from my home page.
By the way, I'd strongly recommend configuring CVS to default to binaries unless told otherwise for this kind of config. It's a nasty surprise to realize that CVS just mangled all of your