Day 11 - Home away from home

Logging in to a machine that isn't your own workstation can be scary. You are subject to the decisions made in someone else's configuration files that don't always align with your own configurations: different shell, different default shell configuration, different default editor, different editor configuration, etc.

This is a scary and unproductive place. Suddenly 'ls' output is colored, or vim uses a different indenting configuration, or worse, the default editor is not your favorite editor (which doesn't have to be vim). Dedication to mastering your basic tools over time has helped you create the One True Configuration for each tool; deviation from this configuration means a loss of productivity. You need to bring your home (directory) with you.

When your home directory doesn't magically appear through the miracles of network filesystems, you may need to fix the problem another way. One potential solution is to make sure that you copy all your configuration files (.vimrc, .zshrc, whatever) to every host you're going to login to. This doesn't scale. Further, it means everyone else has to repeat the same process for their own files.

The fix is to create a system which automatically keeps your home directory, on every machine, populated with your configurations. You can do this minimally with revision control and a cron job, but I prefer to add rsync to this process.

Step one is make a place in your revision control system for people to create home directories. For example, declaring that the path /trunk/home in your repository is where you should dump your homedirectory contents. This means if my username were 'jordan' then I'd check my '.vimrc' in as '/trunk/home/jordan/.vimrc' and should expect it to show up on any system I have access to.

Step two is to pick a server that has access to both revision control and other servers. Set up a cron job here that will check out and keep-updated your entire /trunk/home path. Run an rsync daemon here that exports this /trunk/home for other servers to update with. Set the rsync module name to 'homedirs' for readability.

Step three is to deploy a cron job on every necessary server that copies down all the obvious files from someserver::homedirs with rsync. You do have automation that lets you install a cron job on all of your servers, right? ;)

Before you go and write the one line of rsync invocation that it would take to copy someserver::homedirs to /home, you should take care to note the potential security implications of doing this as root. If I have a file checked in called /home/jls/test/shadow, and on one of the servers I sneakily symlink /home/jls/test/ to /etc, and you run the rsync blindly as root, you just let me overwrite your /etc/shadow file (or something else evil). Malicious or accidental, doing a single rsync may not be the best solution.

The fix is to run the rsync as each user. You can get the list of users to copy down by running 'rsync someserver::homedirs' to get the list of directories, which should include your usernames. Check out the completed version of the sync home directories script.

You should now be able to modify your home directory files in revision control and have them automatically propogate without your assistance.

Further reading:

• rsync homepage

The 'run rsync as the user' security idea from Pete Fritchman.