Accessing other shares from NFS mounted home directories

Hi All,

We mount /home on our front end Linux machines via NFS from a backend Linux NFS file server. This is nice and simple and reliable so far. We want our user's to be able to access other shares but make them appear under their home directory, eg mount remote_share under /home/username/Shares/remote_share. We could use automount or pam_mount to do the mounting when the user logs in. But the problem is that, unless there is some trick or new feature I am unaware of, NFS doesn't appear to be able to mount remote filesystems under these NFS home directories on the front-end Linux NFS client machine.

Mounting the remote filesystems elsewhere on the server and using symbolic links to point to make them appear to be under the user's home directory appears to be the only solution. If anyone knows of a better way to achieve this I would greatly appreciate hearing about it. If we go the symbolic links way, automating the process of creating the mounts and the symbolic links appears to be messy. It was also suggested to me that I use the mount with the --bind option but I can't see how this would allow me to achieve mounts under the home directory. Automount may be another option but I not that familiar with it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to implement a solution for the above situation?

Thanks

Murray

-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games.
Get your fingers limbered up and give it your best shot. 4 great events, 4 opportunities to win big! Highest score wins.NEC IT Guy Games. Play to win an NEC 61 plasma display. Visit http://www.necitguy.com/?r=20
_______________________________________________
NFS maillist - [email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nfs

Hi Murray,
If I understand you, what you are trying to do is mount NFS
filesystems on mount points that are itself an nfs filesystem.
We are currently do just this and it appears to work OK. We are having one slight isolated problem with a symbolic link going missing however this may or may not be due to mounting the mountpoints via NFS.

Basically here I export the directory:
/server
which contains the directorys (which I use as mount points for the actual disk patitions of the server and as NFS mountpoint on the client) /server/volumes/vol1
/server/volumes/vol2
/server/volumes/vol3

Then on the clients I go about mounting the NFS mounts onto these volX mount points.

Therefore out fstab on a client machine looks like:

##client specific stuff##
...
melbourne-fs3:/server /server nfs defaults 0 2

melbourne-fs3:/server/volumes/vol2      /server/volumes/vol2     nfs     defaults  0 2
melbourne-fs3:/server/volumes/vol1      /server/volumes/vol1     nfs     defaults  0 2
melbourne-fs3:/server/volumes/vol0      /server/volumes/vol0     nfs     defaults  0 2

The fstab looks a little confusing with all the '/server/volumes/' but just remember that the 'melbourne-fs3:/server/volumes/volx' are where physcal disk partitions have been mounted on the
server and the '/server/volumes/volx' mount points are mounting those same physical patitions on the Linux client machines via NFS.

We use SuSE 9.2 Professional for Clients and Server.

Hope this is of value to you,

Regards,
David

-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games.
Get your fingers limbered up and give it your best shot. 4 great events, 4 opportunities to win big! Highest score wins.NEC IT Guy Games. Play to win an NEC 61 plasma display. Visit http://www.necitguy.com/?r=20
_______________________________________________
NFS maillist - [email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nfs