[ale] unified home directory different OS versions

[Vernard Martin]

Robert Story wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 13:29:05 -0500 (GMT-05:00) Dow_Hurst wrote:
> D> How do enterprise environments deal with unified home directories among Linux machines with different OS versions and distributions?
>
> I'll see your 'different OS versions', and raise you 'different CPU
> architectures'. I've had this problem for years at home with my mix of
> ppc/x86 machines, and have never found a good solution. I use the kludge you
> mentioned (user data directory + per machine home directory), with the
>   
Way back in the dark ages when I was a sysaadmin at GA Tech in the
College of Computing, we had Solaris, SunOS, SGI IRIX and RedHat Linux. 
So we created some master .login and .profile scripts (for both csh and
ksh shell users respectively) that figured out what architecture you
were on and setup the environment variables appropriately for the major
applications that we were using: Web Browser, LaTex, etc.

We discovered that the time it took to actually maintain this system
with the literally hundreds of applications that we had to support (both
open source and third party vendor) was much less than the time it took
to either upgrade all the machines to the same OS level or decomission
the machines that couldn't be upgraded. We ended up with a combo of
Solaris and RedHat at the end and that was manageable for the most part.
But I strongly encourage you to reduce the number of target platform
combinations you have as much as possible before attempting to solve
this problem. It greatly reduced the amount of work involved.