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Asked: 2012-01-13 06:26:44 +0800 CST

250 users with a data dir on a central server - how would you set it up?

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I'd like to get best-practice advice on how to setup a scheme where 250 users or more have OS independent access to their own data-dir / user-dir on a central server in the local network. from the server's perspective:

  • Would you set up a big /users dir on the server with subdirs for each user with quota, on one big partition (underlying fat storage, of course)?

  • Or would you setup a dedicated partition for each user living in a big ZFS, LVM disk pool?

Dirs would be shared over the network via SAMBA, NFS or probably WebDAV, HBA, aoE - not fully knowing what the latter do to the permission case...

What are the pros and cons of "dedicated partition" vs "permission based shared partition"? What's best practice today?

thin-client storage best-practices client-server

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Partitions:

    Cons: Partition based allocation would be extremely cumbersome in all cases creating new users,deleting and migrating to other machines.

    A better solution would be to use nfs with quotas.

    Pros: easier to manage , increase allocation etc.

    In case you choose to not go with NFS you can have individual home directories in seperate files

    eg

    dd if=/dev/zero of=user-A bs=1024 count=1000000

    This creates a 1G file user-A which will be used for A's network directory

    root@x:/tmp# mkfs.ext3 user-A 
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
user-A is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y

    format

    root@x:/tmp# mkdir users/user-A

root@x:/tmp# mount user-A users/user-A -o loop
root@x:/tmp# df users/user-A/

    mount this.

    Pros: easier to add/delete users,migrate between disks/servers

    Cons: changing size of directories,

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