OK, I know its been over a month, I have been busy.
A two week holiday. A week of it in sunny Scarborough, an work picking up has conspired to by absence of bloggin in the last month. Probably why my hit rate for the site is in single figures but hey, thats not why we are here is it.
Just to make Ian (my only reader) happy I will give him a mention and also that the project has taken a futher turn. While away lounging by the sea, it was decided that we are going to use local home directories, somthing that Ian has been pushing to implement for some time.
The way it was done pissed me off more than the actual decision. Despite appearences, I try to keep the direction of the project running along mutually agreed lines. This decision was forced through before I came back of holiday and it felt very much like fuck you Brad, you are away so I am going to do it anyway.
Not very nice feeling.
I had been working on using a product called ExtremeZ-IP, an AFP/IP server software for Windows 2000 server. We had already purchased a cluster for SMB home directories (which caused application issues) and with a relatively small further investment, we could re-use the servers and have stable network homes. It was working well before I went away but the 30 day trial on the software expired while I was on holiday. This is now scrapped and the work pointless.
As I said, the fact we were now going to use local homes is not that much of a problem, the machines will run faster that network homes, it means however that we are having to write login and logout scripts to sync the users home directories (or bits of them) to the server volumes.
I am working on this with one of the unix veteran sysops and we should have something reasonably quickly I hope.