Laptop And NFS Homedir

Home » CentOS » Laptop And NFS Homedir
CentOS 8 Comments

Afternoon,

Are there any documented best practices for using NFS home directories on laptops? Right now, and this is on CentOS 7, when I disconnect the machine from the network, the desktop freezes, and I can’t even tell if the machine switches to the wireless network. If this sort of adapter switching, which is standard in e.g. Windows 10, is even supported.

Thanks for any insights.

8 thoughts on - Laptop And NFS Homedir

  • At Wed, 26 Aug 2020 12:08:56 +0100 CentOS mailing list wrote:

    My (old) CentOS 6 laptop switches seemlessly between hard wired and wireless.
    I *am not* using NFS, though. One thing that is key, you need to be sure your DHCP deamon is configured to give out the same IP address for both the wired Ethernet MAC and the wireles MAC.

    NFS is somewhat fussy.

  • I’d say: Don’t do it.

    NFS does not handle disconnected operations well, nor does the client handle IP migrations well. You’d have to restart the client to get it to work, most likely, and processes that are living in $HOME would need to be killed before you could unmount it.

    There is some effort being made in making fscache work with NFS but I’ve not had much luck in CentOS7 or 8. It still wouldn’t help with IP roaming.

    Best advice I can offer is to make $HOME local but have symlinks into NFS for directories that can be safely unmounted and remounted.

    Windows doesn’t really have network home directories like UNIX does, and their SMB client handles IP roaming better.

  • But, if your configuration makes sure that the IP address stays the same, shouldn’t it work then, at least with UDP?

    Simon

  • I would echo this. I experimented with networked home directories for laptop users for a while and never managed to find anything that resembled a nice experience. Even on Windows it mostly sucks. I don’t expect this reality has changed much.

    I would instead look at cloud sync clients. The open source Linux OneDrive client is pretty good these days for example.

    Of course the “cloud” end can also be on-premise using OwnCloud or NextCloud or whatever the latest cool thing is.

  • At Wed, 26 Aug 2020 09:08:15 -0400 CentOS mailing list wrote:

    Even better: rather than hard mounting (eg in /etc/fstab) NFS file systems on a *laptop*, instead, use automount (autofs).

  • I’ve been playing with OwnCloud on a home network recently and it seems to be handling sync traffic well. A couple of points to make:
    1) Be aware that the server and client repositories are different. You can do a lot with the web interface to the server, but you’ll really want the client for ease of use.
    2) Synchronising isn’t instant. It can take a few minutes for 100+ MiB
    syncs, particularly since I was going W10 (clinet)->VM (server) ->host
    (client).

    Other than the above, it’s basically set-and-forget. I can download photos onto the laptop, run GIMP on the C7 machine, and store the results on the C8 VM server quite happily.

    —
    J Martin Rushton MBCS

  • In my professional environment, user’s laptop have small (but fast ;-))
    storage and a local home directory (CentOS7). They use SSHFS to reach a central storage for most of their needs. This central storage is secured (ceph replication + daily backup). It works also from home but, of course, with lower performances behind an ADSL box. No problem with closing connections.

    Patrick

    Le 26/08/2020 à 15:08, Jonathan Billings a écrit :