Some input well appreciate

[malay boy]

Hi Guru,
Need some advice on managing the data center.Actually I just took over a data center and is a complete mess.
We have 5 Tru64,7 SunOS and 3 HP.We are using NIS to managed the user.NIS is running on LINUX.
The home directories of the user are scattered across the server and user are should have access to all server.
Let say there are user A and home directory of the user are in server A.Thus when user logon to server B,he will get a / as home directory.As the user A home directory are not avaiable on server B.
I was thingking to create a small filesystem for each user and mount this filesystem to all server.Example: user A will have a home directory as /home/A.And /home/A are the filesystem and this file system will be mounted to all server.

What do you think or any better idea?.More more thing are NIS/DNS are free from HP like CIFS...

regards
mB

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
I think you are on the right way, create a filesystem with home directorys on ona server, mount it (example /export/home) and export it.
NFS-mount this filesystem on the other servers (/home).
Create a link /home->/export/home on the server where the filesystem is located.

I use this method on our servers.

NIS comes originally from SUN, I am not sure about DNS.

[Steven E. Protter]

I'll work backwards:

NIS/DNS do come with HP-UX as part of the core OS.

The latest DNS is available at software.hp.com
Link:
http://software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=BIND9.2

As a first step, you might want to think about consolidating the user home directories some place. It should be a fast server, with enough space to hold the data.

A problem you might have is files from user a on one server are not in synch with the files on the second server for that same user.

You could go for a latest date scenario for consolidating the files.

Consolidation will probably be a manual process.

One idea that comes to mind is having the users mount a home filesystem via CIFS/Samba on the centralized server.

With some dialogue, we can probably fine tune this concept.

Good Luck,

SEP