Each users files on multiple computers

[groovee]

Hi,
If there's an office with say 20 computers, and *each* employee logging in to ANY machine should get their OWN files on their desktop - how do I effect that? (and probably wallpaper too - ie. it should look like *their* machine, no matter which physical computer they're using!)
If ALL the hard disks, instead of simply being plugged into one computer, are to appear to the system as *ONE* large HD, accessible from any of the machines - well, is this "RedHat Global Filesystem" what's required to do the trick here? Or should I go the "cloud-y" way or something for that?


Thanks.

 

[atanere]

Hi @groovee, and welcome to the site! I imagine you could use the cloud for this, but an office server should work very well. Using a Network File System (NFS) server, each user will have their /home/username personal data stored on the server and linked via the network to each workstation in your office. Here is an Ubuntu introduction on how to accomplish this. Another method (with some limitations to consider) is "synchronizing" the users data between all the machines... here is a brief discussion of these methods. Constantly synchronizing between 20 machines seems like a lot of unnecessary network traffic to me though, as opposed to the single storage point of a server.

I'm not sure about the desktop wallpaper, but I think that it would work also if stored on the NFS server, and each workstation were configured to retrieve it from there.

Server administration is not my thing... so the above is just some stuff I dug up on Google. Is deploying an office server within your own skill set? Are the office networking capabilities up to the task? Depending on your needs, you might consider a secondary server on standby in case the primary servers has a failure, or at least a secondary storage that the primary server will synchronize its data with to minimize data loss in case of failure of the primary server. These are the reasons that I'm not a server admin... it makes my head hurt!

Good luck!

 

[ilgtech]

I feel silly asking this but I feel it's relevant; are we talking about linux client nodes or are we discussing Windows client operating systems logging into a domain controller that is a guest on the KVM host? Before I try to answer I'd like to get the clarification.
If we're working in a Red Hat Native environment, then I highly suggest getting familiar with this: Red_Hat_Documentation That in particular would be where I'd be looking for answers. If you've implemented these Red-Hat features on your network, would the vendor not offer support to this specialized Red Hat functionality? These are all things that come to mind when reading your question. I hope in this answer I haven't muddied the waters.