[nzlug] Recommendation for office laptop setup

[Toby Collett]

Hi all,
I am looking after the IT requirements of a small tech company (<10 staff,
but probably doubling in the next 12 months). It is a new company so all the
IT systems are being setup fresh, which has both advantages and
disadvantages...

My question is on how to set up network home drivers, I currently have samba
shares set up which work fine for desktops, but we are also going to have
several laptops on the network and the challenge comes when these need to go
offsite...(and therefore off the network). There are obviously some easy
setup options such as just having local accounts on the laptops and don't
have them participate equally on the network, but I was hoping to do a
little better than that.

So really this has two parts:
1) What sort of schemes for 'roaming profiles' (for lack of a better term)
do people use or recommend out there, and
2) What technologies to implement the scheme

A few of the options I'm tossing around to just to get things started:
- split the profile part of the home drive and the data parts, have the
profile rsync'd/unison'd at login/logout and mount the data part. This means
that the users will still be able to login when offsite (assuming we cache
authentication...) but will only have access to the data portion in the
office, so they would need to explicitly copy/sync the data they want before
leaving and returning.
- sync the whole home drives on log in/out, but these are potentially big
home drives (> 1GB, there are software developers with all the svn checkouts
etc...)
- Filesystems that automatically support connections that come and go (such
as coda), this is interesting to me, but Im worried it could be a little
much to implement, any one had experience with it and wish to comment?

A few more comments, most users will have 'their pc' that they will use on a
daily basis, but the laptops are likely to be shared. Despite users having
their PC it would be nice to have support for just moving them to another
computer for replacements/upgrades/etc. We currently have this with the
samba solution.

Enough from me, looking forward to everyones thoughts,

Toby Collett

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