[Labs-l] Moving away from NFS homedir instance on Oct 30

[Ryan Lane]

A few weeks ago I changed the /home mount to be a direct, rather than
an indirect, automount, which means that all of /home is mounted
rather than directories for each user. I did this in anticipation of
switching to glustefs for homedirs, but specifically I did it in
anticipation of enabling pam_mkhomedir. Today I enabled pam_mkhomedir.
So, if you log into an instance and your home directory didn't already
exist in the project, the instance will create it automatically.

This is one step towards getting rid of the centralized NFS instance,
which is really small, causes us performance issues, and often fills
up, causing lots of annoying issues.

Tuesday night (Oct 30) I'll switch the home directories over to
glusterfs storage, rather than the centralized home directories. This
isn't an easy switch. I'm going to take the following steps:

1. Change the NFS home directories to be read-only
2. Copy each project's data to its private gluster share
3. Change the autofs information in LDAP to point the /home mount to
the private gluster share

After doing so, instances will need to be rebooted to use the new
mount. Until your instance is rebooted your home directories will be
read-only. After all instances are switched off of NFS, I'm going to
delete the NFS instance.

- Ryan