This is one of the big things that was taught at UC Davis undergrad program, at least in the past. In order to assure portability, students have access to many nix platforms (SGI, Arch Linux, Solaris, etc.) and their homedirs mount as you'd expected at login to any of the boxes in the pool. I think they have FreeBSD boxes now, but I could be wrong. (EDIT: nope, what a shame. The trio of BSDs.)<p>PS: I nearly got thrown out for running John The Ripper on everyone's password hashes, which were conveniently served up over NIS. I did inform a prof that his password was super, super insecure because I mailed it to him. :)) Then, I nearly got thrown out again for mirroring some Oracle DBMS docs because they were stupidly IP restricted, and I didn't want physically go to CSIF cluster. Finally graduated though, I think they were just glad to get rid of yours truly. :)
I tend to use slightly embarrassing terms for config options that enable workarounds. This motivates to deprecate these bugfeatures as soon as possible. Who would want to have 'fickle_timestamps' or 'fudged_routing'?<p>Interestingly I use a similar policy when selecting my passphrases. My passphrases are bad four-word poems about personal experiences. Thus I'm personally invested in protecting passphrases and keeping discipline even for "worthless" accounts. I wouldn't be comfortable about sharing even my old passphrases.