HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Configuration Management

Local versus Remote Home Directories
Users can have their home directory on their own local system or on a remote file server.
The advantage of keeping all users’ home directories on one file server is that you can
back up all the accounts at one time.
If a user’s home directory is on a remote server, you may want to create a minimal
home directory on the local system so that a user can still log into the local system if
the server is down. For information on whether you should share users’ home and mail
directories, see the HP-UX System Administrator’s Guide: Overview.
See “Adding a User to Several Systems: A Case Study” (page 70) for steps to create a
home directory on a remote system.
Adding a User to Several Systems: A Case Study
The following example shows how to mount Tom’s home directory and work directory
from the file server, flserver, and mount Emacs from the application server,
appserver.
Figure 4-3 Adding a User to Several Systems
Before beginning, make sure Tom’s login name has a user ID that is unique across the
systems he is going to use. (Your network administrator may have a program to ensure
the uniqueness of user ID numbers.)
70 Configuring Users and Groups