The end goal is to be able to sign in from my friends computers and have my files there seamlessly and my friends able to sign in on my computer with their files there seamlessly. We could set up ceph nodes at each of our houses
Way, way, way overkill even if it could work. Try doing a search for ‘roaming profiles linux’ and you should find some solutions that are a better fit.
Okay after looking around a little bit it seems LDAP and NFS is the way people usually do it but that’s online only. This guy recommends against it. Then This thread mentions LDAP with NFS again but I’m not sure if NFS will work. We have laptops and might not be connected to the internet. I might say f it and go way, way, way overkill cause why not. Worse thing that can happen is I learn something. I hope it does work
When you start talking about offline then you’re going to run into consistency issues and conflicts. How will a system automatically determine which edit to a file is correct if they were both edited offline?
I’m fairly certain Ceph is also going to be online only. You won’t be accessing your CephFS filesystems when you take your laptop offline since they’re part of the object store.
Something like Syncthing (as @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me suggested) or some other ‘Dropbox-like’ self-hosted solution might be the way to go for what you’re doing. Even then you’ll probably only want to replicate a subset of your home directory - for example I’d skip temp and cache files that a lot of programs create.
If you want to play with Ceph just for the sake of doing so then don’t let me stop you though :)