Havoc Pennington wrote, > Appreciate feedback, especially from anyone who has time to try out > the HOWTO. We expect the code to change quite a bit as issues and > suggestions come in. I think this is a fine idea. I have a few questions tho' ... Outside of largish corporates where clones are common, there are smaller environments where machines are mostly (95%+, say) similar, but where there are machine-by-machine variations which fall outside the set of things which are covered by per-user homes or hardware auto- configuration. For instance, differences in which services should be running, their configuration, or minor kernel tweaks. Are such environments outside the scope of this proposal, or is there some plan to support per-machine or per-group/class deltas from a common baseline? One thing that's always stopped me from bothering with NFS mounted homes is that for me a different machine quite often implies a different role, hence that the stuff that's appropriate to be in my home varies. This also tends to be a delta from a common baseline, so handling the variability by having distinct users for each role doesn't seem like quite the right answer. Caching doesn't seem likely to change this, and the "recreate Joe's workstation" scenario in the document seems to wander into this kind of territory. Do you have any thoughts about handling this? Slightly related to the previous two questions ... My laptop moves between my home network, my work network, business-client networks, connected by dialup ISP, and disconnected. In each scenario the services running, their configuration, and what's appropriate for my home dir vary slightly. Even tho' this is pretty clearly beyond the scope of your proposal, there seems to be at least something in common: the setup is mostly the same, but there are some small deltas. Would it make sense to have a common mechanism to handle this? I think all my questions boil down to: looks great for the 95% of stuff which stays the same, but how do you deal with the 5% of stuff which varies? And can you do it in a way which is 95% less hassle than treating the machines as completely separate entities? Cheers, Miles
