Sharing /tmp through NFS

[Bennett Todd]

As Gregory Bond points out, there are problems with sharing an NFS-mounted
/tmp directory over a network. The performance question is a real issue,
except that diskless machines are getting to everything via the network
anyway. I hate having /tmp be on root, and don't want a slew of additional
partitions to give every machine its own /tmp, so I had every machine
mount up one common /tmp partition via NFS. PID collisions could
potentially have been a (rare) occurance; what bit me immediately was
cutting and pasting between windows. Apparantly that is routed through a
file (/tmp/winselection?) that has a fixed name.  It was really amusing
when users were cutting and pasting from each other's windows:-).

My solution was to have everyone mount a common tmp filesystem on
/nfs/tmp. This filesystem had subdirectories for each machine, so machine
"orion" had a directory /nfs/tmp/orion. Finally I put symlinks in the root
directories for each machine pointing to their tmp subdirectory. I haven't
had any problems since. I really like sharing /tmp; whereas for one
machine I'd want to have at least 4-5M free for tmp files, I haven't run
into any problems sharing ~20M among a dozen machines. 

-Bennett
bet at orion.mc.duke.edu