> Littering config files across the datacenter just isn't an option.
Er, what about an LDAP server for user profiles and an NFS server for home directories, like the university timesharing clusters of olde? Any box you'd log into would have "your config files" (in fact, your whole home directory) on it.
NFS is a nightmare, for many reasons. But there are similar solutions such as `pam_mkhomedir` which can be coerced into fetching dotfiles when a user logs in, etc.
Could you please share some of those reasons? I ask because I'm doing this... hasn't been a problem yet, but I'd rather know about issues now than later!
NFS can frequently cause hanging guests if the server goes away, leaving the filesystem mounted.
Locking is often a problem, for example if you've got ~ mounted on NFS and you're delivering mail to mboxes - obviously maildirs sidestep that particular problem.
Firewalling is a real pain, as is access-control and UID remapping. (These are more concerns when you have a single server sharing a tree to multiple clients.)
Finally failover & high-availablity are hard because you can't do transitions terribly easily, although hacks exist using automounter, etc.
Er, what about an LDAP server for user profiles and an NFS server for home directories, like the university timesharing clusters of olde? Any box you'd log into would have "your config files" (in fact, your whole home directory) on it.
Or, if the LDAP part is a hassle, be a hipster and pull all the 'user profile' info from GitHub (https://github.com/tsutsu/github-auth3).