PAM-mount configuration

Introduction

To be able to easily take advantage of HIIT's file service few mounts need to be done. Due to security reasons use of NFS isn't possible so we have chosen CIFS (Common Internet File System) to be the method with which shared disks can be accessed in a secure manner. Because CIFS-mounts are authenticated individially, unlike NFS-mounts that really aren't authenticated at all (well, uid and gid, but that's more ACL than authentication), we need to

Authentication requires login and password to be provided for each mount. This is quite burdensome, so we'll use pam_mount to help us with this.

Mount procedure creates directory fs to user's home directory and then mounts all available CIFS-shares under that directory. All mounts are automatically unmounted on user's last logout on specific host.

These configurations currently mount the following shares: homes, group, scratch and install.

LDAP configurations differ between RedHat- based and Debian- based distributions. That's why there are different instructions for both of them.

Debian based distributions (Ubuntu, etc.)

First you need to configure your computer to use LDAP authentication. This configures PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules for Linux) and does some configurations needed to use pam_mount module.

Install

aptitude install libpam-mount smbfs

Download new configurations and unpack them

cd /
curl -O http://www.hiit.fi/it/tech/config/pammount-config-debian.tar.gz
tar xzf pammount-config-debian.tar.gz
rm pammount-config-debian.tar.gz

That's it. Log out and in again and mounts should be created under ~/fs/.

RedHat based distributions (CentOS, etc.)

Content will be added later.

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