Please test: Linux roaming profiles

[Mark Hannon]

Hi,

For many years I have run with NFS mounted home directories shared
across the hosts in my LAN for linux hosts whilst using windows roaming
profiles to a samba server to share user state across windows machines.

At various stages I have played around with roaming profiles by hacking
scripts at the front and back end of the gnome-session scripts but
recently I came across some software called csync that integrates into
PAM to easily sync a linux profile (i.e. $HOME) to/from a samba server.

The advantages of this are:

(a) Speed - it is definitely noticeable in startup times of some apps
(b) Robustness - my desktops are less likely to be frozen while I take
the file server offline
(c) Easier to play with multiple OS versions - I often run into trouble
running multiple distribution versions to the same $HOME

In any case, the latest version of csync is available in a PPA at
https://launchpad.net/~markhannon/+archive/ppa

Install libpam-csync, configure /etc/security/pam_csync.conf
and /etc/pam.d/gdm and away you go!   

Hope it is useful to someone.

Regards/Mark