As said, we will not worry about frontend /home and /share synchronization. Separate file system to a separate NAS node will help simplify the dependencies between machine a lot.

For this, you can use NAS Appliance to do this for you. Install a separate node as NAS appliance, and then modify autofs to mount /home and /share from the node instead. Let’s say that we have a node call “nas-0-0”, and we want to move all mount point of /home and /share to this node.

• Edit /etc/auto.share on Frontend.
• Change hostname from FE1 to nas-0-0.local:/

For /home, there is a little bit tricky part because you will also need to modify rocks sync users to make the new /home space aware. ROCKS 5.1 has a capability to use a separate NAS node to do this job for you already. All you need to do is

Warning! I didn’t test this. At the time of cluster implementation we used Lustre instead

rocks add var Info HomeDirSrv nas-0-0.local

rocks add var Info HomeDirLoc /path/to/where/you/put/home/and/nfs/exported

NOTE: All these are coming from /opt/rocks/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rocks/commands/sync/users/plugin_fixnewusers.py

This will make “rocks sync users” to automatically add entry to /etc/auto.home and modify users’s default home directory (from /export to /home) in /etc/passwd entry. You may need to edit /etc/auto.home manually for any existing users. Since /etc/auto.* is shared automatically via 411, modify this on FE1 is enough. Propagate file through 411 now.

make -C /var/411 force

NOTE: Another way to do this is to change the default home directory path for useradd command in /etc/default/useradd from /export to something else. rocks sync users will not touch any entry not begin with /export/home.