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David Yu
Asked: 2009-12-23 13:54:09 +0800 CST

Copy Network Volume configuration among Linux systems

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I have several standalone Debian Linux (Lenny) systems. As it stands now, all of the systems are configured with a generic login account. This login account has a network volume that connects to a Windows share on a Windows server. I need to create a batch of user accounts on all of the systems (this part I figured out).

After I create all of the user accounts, I need all of them to have the same network volume mapping as the current generic account. Is the network volume configuration saved somewhere, where I could copy that configuration across all of the user accounts?

linux

2 Answers

  1. You should say how are you mounting the volume. I guess you are using some kind of GUI tool, such as Gnome's.

    There might be a way to make that work using your system, but I recommend changing the method of mounting the volume to something more "scriptable":

    • You can use /etc/fstab to define system-wide mounts.
    • You could use smbnetfs or fusesmb to mount Samba (Windows filesharing/CIFS for Linux) shares

    You could make it work using your current method, but it's probably more work. I know by certain that these two methods are more easily "scriptable".

    If you choose /etc/fstab, you just need to distribute the line required to mount your network share to all your hosts. If these are not too much, you could do it by hand, but as the number of hosts grows, or the maintenance required increases, you should automate it.

    You can also distribute the required files to make fusesmb/smbnetfs to work across a network easily.

    You might want to look into either:

    • Puppet: it's a configuration management system which lets you manage lots of hosts easily through centralized scripts
    • Net booting a single hdd image or finding a way to image systems quickly

    If you just want to replicate a single system image across multiple boxes, I would look at the latter; you just configure one box "just the way you like it" and then either boot all boxes from the same image via the network or copy the same image easily to all boxes. Roughly, imaging is easier; netbooting tends to be more convenient.

    I guess Puppet is much more complex, but depending on what you are doing, it might be absolutely worthwhile.

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  2. Best Answer

    I tried modifying the /etc/fstab as suggested by Alex but I had some issues with that. Probably on my end since my Linux skills are lacking. I did find a utility named gconf-editor that allows me to copy a configuration to a default or mandatory profile. So I just copied the connected_servers key on a configured profile over to default and further users came up with the same connection. Since I didn't have a lot of clients this was a quick and doable solution.

    After that, the created accounts came up with the network volume connection.

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