On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 14:30, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote: > Aaron Gaudio wrote: > > >But why can't your web server nfs mount the user home dirs (or a portion > >thereof, if you don't want to give the webserver nfs access to their > >non-web dirs)? Using autofs (maybe with a custom autofs script) could > >help facilitate that. > > > That's reverse. At least, in my mind it is. Why would I want the > webserver mount the user dirs? I want the user files, and anything web > related to be on a completely different, physical machine. So, in essence: > > user shell server web server > ==================================================== > john_doe /home/john_doe > /home/john_doe/www ---> /www/john_doe > billybob /home/billybob > /home/billybob/www ---> /www/billybob > etc. > > When user john_doe logs into the shell server (the only machine > anyone has access to), I need some way for their www directory to also > be accessible to them, so they can create/edit/maintain their own > stuff. And it has to be live so they can see their changes right away. > Also, they don't always use their shell to maintain their site. They > use a range of software to work on their sites. FrontPage, Dreamweaver, > GoLive, and BBedit are just a few of the applications they use to ftp in > to their account to make changes to their site. I need some way for > their www stuff to always be live and accessible, not only when they use > a shell log in. > > See, I did this with /var/mail (or /var/spool/mail) already. Since > all user INBOXes sit in the same location, ti was easy to move that to a > separate spool server, and just mount the partition on the shell > server. Problem solved. But now, I'm dealing with hundreds of user > folders, since each person has their own web space. > So then just nfs mount the /var/www directory from the web server onto a suitable location on your users shell machine and make sure each users web space has proper permissions for that user. A soft link created by "ln -s <nfs/mount/point>/bob /home/bob/www" would then give them access to their own space on the web server. Scripts can be set up to do the directory creation and linking when the user is created or removed.
