[nzlug] Shared Home Partitions & logging in as the same user twice

[Daniel Pittman]

Robin Sheat <robin at kallisti.net.nz> writes:
> On Friday 14 March 2008 21:18:46 Howard wrote:
>> I assume it is up to individual programs to manage conflicts with regard
>> to setup files etc, but I'd hope they generally manage this properly.
>
> IME, they warn you if it's going to be a problem. I know kmail
> does. If they don't, it's a bug and should be reported. The worst you
> should get is that whichever the last one is to close will be the one
> to have its settings saved.

Mmmm.  That is a more optimistic view than I would take, although my
opinions may be coloured by the state of play ten years ago -- and it
may have improved.

At the time a depressingly large proportion of non-trivial software
would corrupt their data stores if run on two machines concurrently. 

Worse, a sadly large number did no locking or did NFS-unsafe locking, so
they wouldn't correctly detect the other running instance on another
machine anyway. :/


The short answer: try not to be logged in on two machines at once.

>> Also, both are the same Ubuntu OS (one is a 64 bit, and the other is 32
>> bit however), but both should be matched closely in terms of
>> versions/updates.  I'm guessing that different OSs may store their
>> program configs in different places.
>
> They shouldn't have problems. The configs are typically text-based, so
> different architectures don't conflict with one another.

Mostly: applications that are poorly coded and use binary storage
formats may have issues.  Anything that writes an 'int' to a file, or
reads one, will have a different size on a 64-bit vs 32-bit
architecture.

That, though, isn't too much drama today: most applications are pretty
good for 32/64 bit cleanliness.

Regards,
        Daniel