Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 37 minutes ago
It was a disaster, not of the natural kind, but one that was corporate. Big Corp had decided to reorganize and move my team to another division. Similar to a natural disaster, our team was now homeless and cut off from the essentials: a file server, "desktop" systems, and directory services. Our choices were to ship our fleet of systems halfway across the country to be managed for us or create our own infrastructure. We choose the later using services found in FreeBSD and a handful of third-party packages. This talk will describe how we used FreeBSD to provide auto-mounted home directories, user accounts that worked on any machine, and virtual desktop systems to duplicate our previous setup and how we have subsequently enhanced it.
It was a disaster, not of the natural kind, but one that was corporate. Big Corp had decided to reorganize and move my team to another division. Similar to a natural disaster, our team was now homeless and cut off from the essentials: a file server, "desktop" systems, and directory services. Our choices were to ship our fleet of systems halfway across the country to be managed for us or create our own infrastructure. We choose the later using services found in FreeBSD and a handful of third-party packages. This talk will describe how we used FreeBSD to provide auto-mounted home directories, user accounts that worked on any machine, and virtual desktop systems to duplicate our previous setup and how we have subsequently enhanced it.
