The standard way to setup a central "/home" directory on a Linux workstation is using NFS. The problem is that I don't like the lack of real security in NFS. So instead I want to try to use SSHFS. SSHFS in-and-of itself works fine, the problem is with mounting it at boot. If I add a line to "/etc/fstab" for the SSHFS share, the workstation complains that it can't contact the SSH server. This is true because the "/etc/fstab" lines are executed before networking is actually up!
Right now I am using the following init script to mount "/home":
#!/bin/sh
# Mounts "/home" over SSHFS at boot
start () {
while true; do
ping -c 1 "10.0.0.200" 1> /dev/null
if [ "$?" = 0 ]; then
break
fi
sleep 1
done
sshfs root@10.0.0.200:/home/ /home/ -o transform_symlinks,allow_other,nonempty,hard_remove
}
case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 {start}"
exit 1
esac
Basically it pings the SSH server once per second until it can connect, then it mounts the SSHFS share.
My question is: Is there a more direct and less "hack-ish" way to make "/etc/fstab" wait until there is an active network connection before attempting to mount "/home"?
An alternative idea I had, was adding the "sshfs root@10.0.0.200:/home/ /home/ -o transform_symlinks,allow_other,nonempty,hard_remove" line as an "post-up" script in "/etc/network/interfaces", but that still feels wrong.
Environment:
Server OS: Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04
Client OS: Ubuntu Desktop 10.04
