Hi William,

On Wed, Dec 26, 2007 at 10:56:59PM -0500, William S. Morgart wrote:
> >From old emails in the codalist archives I gather that having all of a
> user's home directory provided via CODA wasn't recommended, is this
> still true?

That depends.
Home on Coda leads to both great advantages and remarkable inconveniences. :)

> If so what are the gotcha's with providing a user's home
> filesystem via CODA? Note: In this case the user (me) is very
> experienced with UNIX, networked filesystems, etc... i.e. the user is
> able to handle living in an experimental world where things break and is
> willing to fix them too!

Then you will be fine.

Some important details:

Use 6.1 clients, not 6.9. Alas, the newer ones (6.9) are still not reliable
when you write to Coda, they will eventually break.

Keep you strongly connected when doing bigger updates.
On the other side, adaptive mode is vital to survive,
e.g. when mozilla tends to frequently update its state files under .mozilla.

Keep your .bash_history and alike out of Coda (e.g. symlink to /dev/null :)
or patch bash to use hostname as part of the history file name.
Otherwise any ssh login to the same account/homedir and a following "double
logout" will create a conflict on .bash_history (unless strongly connected
everywhere which often isn't feasible) - the same file will be updated
on two computers inside the reintegration time window.

Some programs rely on command sockets to reside under the home directory.
Those programs will fail unless patched. Most often the corresponding
logic is fundamentally incompatible with a situation when a home directory
is shared between simultaneous sessions on different computers.
The same (with possibly less evident breakage) is true for all applications
storing and using host-specific data in the home directory, if they
do not include hostname in the naming. Hopefully this design will gradually
be replaced by consistent hostname-specific naming.
Publish the patches to such applications when you fix them! :)

Good luck, and enjoy Coda!

Rune