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/home as a symlink?

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  /home as a symlink? Jesper Dybdal <jd-debian-user@dybdal.dk> - 2020-10-16 11:40 +0200
    Re: /home as a symlink? Yoann LE BARS <yoann@le-bars.net> - 2020-10-16 12:00 +0200
      Re: /home as a symlink? Jesper Dybdal <jd-debian-user@dybdal.dk> - 2020-10-16 12:20 +0200
        Re: /home as a symlink? Yoann LE BARS <yoann@le-bars.net> - 2020-10-16 12:30 +0200
        Re: /home as a symlink? Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2020-10-16 13:10 +0200
        Re: /home as a symlink? Klaus Singvogel <deb-user-ml@singvogel.net> - 2020-10-16 13:50 +0200
          Re: /home as a symlink? Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> - 2020-10-16 14:00 +0200
        Re: /home as a symlink? Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> - 2020-10-16 14:00 +0200
          Re: /home as a symlink? Jesper Dybdal <jd-debian-user@dybdal.dk> - 2020-10-16 14:10 +0200
    Re: /home as a symlink? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2020-10-16 16:00 +0200
    Re: /home as a symlink? deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2020-10-16 20:30 +0200
    Re: /home as a symlink? David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-10-16 21:10 +0200
    Re: /home as a symlink? Mike Castle <dalgoda+debian@gmail.com> - 2020-10-17 22:50 +0200

#227846 — /home as a symlink?

I currently have /home in the root partition.  I am considering moving 
it to a different existing partition.

Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?

Or perhaps set up a symlink for each user: /home/user1 => /disk2/home/user1?

Do either of these run a risk of files under /home being needed before 
/disk2 is mounted (it is in fstab)?

Thanks,
Jesper

-- 
Jesper Dybdal
http://www.dybdal.dk

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#227847

Hello everybody out there!

On 2020/10/16 at 11:23 am, Jesper Dybdal wrote:
> Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?

	You can, but I think a better way is to simply mount the partition as
/home. For instance, I have a separated hard drive for my /home, here is
its /etc/fstab entry:

UUID=35b9219d-1f0a-4b59-8ca5-45c7194ab353 /home           ext4
defaults        0       2

	It works perfectly fine. Actually, I am doing this for years.

	Best regards.

-- 
Yoann LE BARS
https://le-bars.net/yoann/
Diaspora* : ylebars@framasphere.org

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#227849

On 2020-10-16 11:45, Yoann LE BARS wrote:
> On 2020/10/16 at 11:23 am, Jesper Dybdal wrote:
>> Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?
> 	You can, but I think a better way is to simply mount the partition as
> /home.
Thanks for your response.  That would be the natural way of doing it if 
I were partitioning a new disk.  But I don't want to do that, and the 
target disk also has other data, so /home cannot be a complete partition.

-- 
Jesper Dybdal
https://www.dybdal.dk

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#227850

Hello everybody out there!

On 2020/10/16 at 12:18 pm, Jesper Dybdal wrote:
> Thanks for your response.  That would be the natural way of doing it if
> I were partitioning a new disk.  But I don't want to do that, and the
> target disk also has other data, so /home cannot be a complete partition.

	Alright, I did not get that.

	Well, in this case, you can indeed make some symlink. In my experience,
you can either use a symlink to replace /home or to replace /home/user.
Which will be the best way? Well, I guess it depends on what you prefer.

	Best regards.

-- 
Yoann LE BARS
https://le-bars.net/yoann/
Diaspora* : ylebars@framasphere.org

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#227857

Jesper Dybdal composed on 2020-10-16 12:18 (UTC+0200):

> Yoann LE BARS wrote:

>> Jesper Dybdal wrote:

>>> Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?

I can't think of a reason why you couldn't, but maybe there is a reason that
escapes me why you shouldn't.

>> 	You can, but I think a better way is to simply mount the partition as
>> /home.

> Thanks for your response.  That would be the natural way of doing it if 
> I were partitioning a new disk.  But I don't want to do that, and the 
> target disk also has other data, so /home cannot be a complete partition.

Why do you think the presence of non-home data on a filesystem prevents its use
mounted to /home? /home is a perfectly good place to put "other" data on my 40 PCs.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
	is based on faith, not on science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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#227858

Jesper Dybdal wrote:
> 
> On 2020-10-16 11:45, Yoann LE BARS wrote:
> > On 2020/10/16 at 11:23 am, Jesper Dybdal wrote:
> > > Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?
> > 	You can, but I think a better way is to simply mount the partition as
> > /home.
> Thanks for your response.  That would be the natural way of doing it if I
> were partitioning a new disk.  But I don't want to do that, and the target
> disk also has other data, so /home cannot be a complete partition.

I'm already running my Debian with $HOME set to a different path:
/home.disk2/<username>

All I needed to change was the /etc/passwd entry: to the new, different
location; nearly eveything worked fine since then.

I started with this constellation years ago and never changed the path
afterwards. So I don't have any experience in case of a move.

The only "program" which caused issues in the past was apparmor.
For this, I modified: /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d/site.local
and added: @{HOMEDIRS}+=/home.disk2

For the future, I see with doubts that systemd wants to make the home
directory portable and if this will cause issues for my constelation.

Best regards,
	Klaus.
-- 
Klaus Singvogel
GnuPG-Key-ID: 1024R/5068792D  1994-06-27

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#227859

> > > On 2020/10/16 at 11:23 am, Jesper Dybdal wrote:
> > > > Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 01:43:59PM +0200, Klaus Singvogel wrote:
> I'm already running my Debian with $HOME set to a different path:
> /home.disk2/<username>
> 
> All I needed to change was the /etc/passwd entry: to the new, different
> location; nearly eveything worked fine since then.
> 
> I started with this constellation years ago and never changed the path
> afterwards. So I don't have any experience in case of a move.
> 
> The only "program" which caused issues in the past was apparmor.
> For this, I modified: /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d/site.local
> and added: @{HOMEDIRS}+=/home.disk2

The other points I would bring up, when moving user home directories:

1) The user(s) in question should not be logged in.  If you're moving
   the entire /home then all users should be logged out.  Log in
   directly as root, on the text console if possible.

2) Any long-running user processes may continue to hold open files in
   the old file system.  Either kill off any such processes, or reboot
   the system after the change.

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#227860

Jesper Dybdal <jd-debian-user@dybdal.dk> writes:

> Thanks for your response.  That would be the natural way of doing it
> if I were partitioning a new disk.  But I don't want to do that, and
> the target disk also has other data, so /home cannot be a complete
> partition.

IIUC, you have a directory on that disk where you want to move the
home directories of your users i.e. /some/path/to/homes to, as well as
some some other directories on that disk.

You could then mount that disk to some mount point, say /data, and
then mount --bind /data/some/path/to/homes /home.

urs

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#227861

On 2020-10-16 13:49, Urs Thuermann wrote:
> IIUC, you have a directory on that disk where you want to move the
> home directories of your users i.e. /some/path/to/homes to, as well as
> some some other directories on that disk.
>
> You could then mount that disk to some mount point, say /data, and
> then mount --bind /data/some/path/to/homes /home.

Thanks!   I hadn't thought of that interesting alternative to a symlink.

Also many thanks to everybody else who answered.

-- 
Jesper Dybdal
https://www.dybdal.dk

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#227866

> Do either of these run a risk of files under /home being needed before
> /disk2 is mounted (it is in fstab)?

No, a normal boot will typically never look inside /home at all, and if
it ever does it should/will likely be quite late, definitely after
mounting /disk2.

So using symlinks like you suggest is perfectly fine and safe,


        Stefan

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#227881

Jesper Dybdal wrote:

> Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?

do this and it will be safe.
I have a symlink in the root partition to real home for 10+ years.

no risk

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#227882

On Fri 16 Oct 2020 at 11:23:13 (+0200), Jesper Dybdal wrote:
> I currently have /home in the root partition.  I am considering moving
> it to a different existing partition.
> 
> Can I simply move the files and then make /home a symlink to /disk2/home?
> 
> Or perhaps set up a symlink for each user: /home/user1 => /disk2/home/user1?

This has the advantage that you can move users' individual home
directories at different times, whenever they're not logged in,
because they don't all have to reside in one location.

> Do either of these run a risk of files under /home being needed before
> /disk2 is mounted (it is in fstab)?

No, fstab is processed before users are alowed to login.

My own systems boot up and run with /home empty¹ (just a mount point
directory). Apart from root, the only user who can login is "unlock",
because their home directory is in /var/local/home/, and the only
thing they can do is unlock an encrypted partition and mount it on
/home, whereupon they get logged out.

¹ I lie: they contain an empty file:
  # ls -l /home/
  total 0
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 27  2019 0
  # 

Cheers,
David.

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#227921

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

You could run into issues where the value of 'pwd' does not equal the value
of 'readlink -f .'.

For myself, I use autofs with autohome.  It's been a while since I've
looked at the details, but I believe it simply does with bind mount
described elsewhere in this thread.  My main machines happen to be down at
the moment, so I can't provide a working example.

Outside of that, I would update /etc/passwd to point to the new location
instead.

mrc

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