[ale] unified home directory different OS versions

[Dow_Hurst]

How do enterprise environments deal with unified home directories among Linux machines with different OS versions and distributions?  We have a NFS file server with home directories exported to multiple client machines with suse 9.3 and 10.1.  We have another NFS file server with home directories exported to multiple client machines with centos 4.3.  There is a LDAP server that provides authentication to the centos clients.  The suse clients authenticate with local passwd files.  I'd like to merge the NFS servers into one server and have all the clients authenticate with the LDAP server.  The problem I've found is different versions of KDE and firefox foul up user's configuration files if the same home directory is used.  Different window managers are easier to deal with than different versions of the same window manager.  Specifying different home directories based on OS version and distro seems like a kludgy solution but does work.  It is just confusing to users to have home directories that are different based on where they login from.  The kludge is to have a single directory a user owns for working data separate from the multiple home directories based on OS version.  That would let them have some continuity in the working environment for file location.

Does anyone have a better way?  It might be possible to work thru moving to a single distribution for the workstation clients.  I just have a hard time believing that there isn't an elegant solution to the problem.  On an SGI under IRIX, each user would have a hidden subdirectory called ~/.desktop-hostname for window manager settings based on the login host.  That kept desktop settings separate based on the host you logged in from.  I'm surprised that KDE doesn't do this by default.  Is it possible to make KDE do this?
Thanks,
Dow


No sig.