Roaming Homedir

Roaming Homedir is a script to make it easy to have your homedir (and thereby settings) with you on all *nix systems you use. It uses rsync and a little bash-magic to make it easy to use.

Roaming Homedir is GPL'ed and was written and conceived by Anders Bruun Olsen. Feel free to send feedback, improvements, bugreports, etc. to <anders@bruun-olsen.net>.

Download

• Version 1.0.0 (released 2003-11-29)

News

• 2003-12-03: Thanks to Hans Schou a way to circumvent the "piping-to-bash" problem was found.

Requirements

To use Roaming Homedir you need the following things in place:

• An internet accessible server with an SSH account to hold your roaming homedir.
• rsync installed both on the server and on the client.
• SSH installed on the client.
• Bash installed on the client.

Usage

The setup of the script is done through some variables set in the top of the script. First you will need to setup the profiles you want to use. The script comes with two profiles that I use: Console Only and Desktop.

You can change these and add more by creating additional PROFILE and LIST variables, just remember to let the numbers increase by one and not skip any! PROFILE contains the name of the profile and LIST is a list of files and dirs that the profile in question contains. Then you should update the SHELL and HOST variables to match your setup. LISTCOMMAND and LISTEND shouldn't need to be changed.

Now you place the script either on the server holding your roaming homedir where you can then scp it to whatever machine you are sitting by. Or on something like an http server where you can easily wget it to the machine you are sitting by.

You can then download the script wherever it is needed and run it. This can be done in one go like this:

bash <(wget -q -O - http://server/roam)

Remember to "push" a profile onto the server before you attempt to "pull" it to a machine (unless ofcourse your server already contains the files for your machines profile).

FAQ

• Q: How do I make it forget the profile I have chosen?
  A: Just remove ~/.roamingprofile

Disclaimer

This script may totally destroy all of your data, burn down your house, bankrupt you, tie red ribbons on your cat and steal your girlfriend. The author can in no way be held responsible for anything this script does!

About Roaming Homedir

In late november 2003 a friend of mine came to me and asked about roaming desktops so that he could have the same settings on all three KDE desktops he uses at various places and keep the settings the same.

That made me think that I actually could also use such a feature for my homedir so that my bash-environment, my vimrc and so forth could be kept the same on the myriad of systems I have accounts on (I'm a sysadmin, I've got accounts on just about a billion machines!).

I knew that rsync was probably the horse to bet on, so I set about finding out how to do it and making the supporting bash-script that would enable me to not have to remember cryptic rsync commands.

Thanks

The following people have contributed to Roaming Homedir:

• Patrick Ben Koetter - Information Architect (creator of the design of this site)