[sf-lug] sf-lug Digest, Vol 401, Issue 1

Grady Broyles slobeck at gmail.com
Tue Mar 6 05:38:57 PST 2018 

Hi. Sorry this is the first thing I felt like I might have something to say
about.
I keep the entire /home on a separate volume too, but take it a step
further to make system re-installs a LOT less painful and safer than just
having a separate home partition.

When I do a fresh install, which is often considering my affinity for
tinkering via breaking/fixing, I want to always re-partition/format my
/dev/sda for peace of mind. I use fdisk.

on a MBR volume using all 4 primary type,
/boot
SWAP
/
/home   (taking the remainder of the volume)

the CONTENTS of /home, however are on yet *another* volume (and an entirely
separate device, in my case)
which i mount to ~/Storage (or something)
so the root of that external volume looks like the non-dot parts of ~/home
(with a few custom ones)
Desktop
Downloads
Music
Pictures
Videos (to which I add)
Builds
Themiong
Scripts
Storage
... you  get the idea

Post-install, I mount my personal data volumes, delete the default home
directories (if i used -m on useradd)
and replace them with symbolic links to the aforementioned volume. As long
as the root of the personal data volume doesn't have anything extraneous,
it just a
ln -sv /<path-to-data-volume/* ~/   ( i always do verbose there just bc)




On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 1:01 AM <sf-lug-request at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting) (Akkana Peck)
>    2. Re: /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting) (Rick Moen)
>    3. Re: /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting) (Ken Shaffer)
>    4. Re: /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting) (Rick Moen)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 20:02:09 -0700
> From: Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com>
> To: sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting)
> Message-ID: <20180306030209.GC13704 at shallowsky.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> jim writes:
> >     the explanation as to why is in the
> > paragreaph: to be able to mount the
> > device to the /home/ directory of
> > whichever Linux is booted. That way
> > users can boot any Linux and expect
> > their files to be as they expect.
> >     Note this requires that the users'
> > UID is the same for all Linux systems.
>
> I've done this for years, and recommend it (with caveats).
> Here's a longer explanation:
>
> When I get a new disk, I make one /boot partition, several small
> (say, 15-20G) partitions, a swap partition (or not), and the rest
> of the disk is /home. Then I can reboot into alternate distros and
> still have all my files available.
>
> Caveats:
>
> 0. The UID issue Jim already mentioned. Since distro installers
> usually want to create a user, I let them create a test user, then
> once the system is up and running I create my own user by hand with
> my correct UID and home directory.
>
> 1. If you're using grub2, you have to disable auto-updating of
> anything in /boot on all but one distro. Grub2 doesn't tolerate
> other versions of grub2 writing to the same /boot and you'll
> eventually end up with 100 lines in your boot menu and maybe
> a system that doesn't boot at all. There are several options:
>
> - Have one distro be the "master" that owns /boot, and on the
>   others, either disable grub2 updates, or just don't mount your
>   /boot partition and let them think that /boot on their own root
>   partition is the real /boot. You'll have to update kernels by hand,
>   though.
>
> - Have no distro be the master, and update your grub2 files in /boot
>   by hand (they're actually perfectly readable and editable).
>
> - Use a more civilized bootloader that can coexist with other
>   distros, like extlinux or grub1 or ?? Depending on your distro
>   you may still have to update the kernel in your boot menu by hand.
>   For instance, after typing that, I checked and discovered that
>   I'm running 3.16.0-4-amd64 but my system is up to 4.14.0-3-amd64.
>   Oops! I guess I should check that more often. I wish Debian made
>   a link pointing to the latest kernel like some distros.
>
> 2. When you boot into another distro, some applications will be at a
> different version, and that can cause config file problems. For
> instance, if you run Firefox, or Gnome, or KDE, when you reboot into
> a different distro, Firefox will want to rewrite a bunch of config
> files to reflect the current version. So every time you reboot
> you'll be shifting back and forth between versions and probably
> eventually your config files will probably get messed up.
>
> You can solve this with symlinks: for instance, make a /localhome
> (lives on the root partition, not /home) and have .mozilla, .gnome
> etc. be symlinks to /localhome/yourname/.mozilla etc. But with
> gnome it gets complicated because they don't keep everything in
> one directory: you'll probably have to make a bunch of symlinks
> and it isn't always easy to figure out which directories need it.
> (That's one of many reasons I switched to using simple window
> managers with config files you can edit and control.)
> With browsers it's easier, or you can just use different profiles.
>
> So it might not be a good option for someone who likes full-featured
> desktops and doesn't understand things like symlinks, but it works
> great if you don't mind taking a more hands-on approach.
>
> Now excuse me while I reboot into a newer kernel. :-)
>
>         ...Akkana
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 19:29:44 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting)
> Message-ID: <20180306032944.GZ14294 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):
>
> > 2. When you boot into another distro, some applications will be at a
> > different version, and that can cause config file problems. For
> > instance, if you run Firefox, or Gnome, or KDE, when you reboot into
> > a different distro, Firefox will want to rewrite a bunch of config
> > files to reflect the current version. So every time you reboot
> > you'll be shifting back and forth between versions and probably
> > eventually your config files will probably get messed up.
>
> I can confirm that this is a big problem with GNOME, particularly since
> that DE makes the contents of its dotfiles and dotfile directories, by
> policy, be forward-compatible (to later releases of GNOME), but often
> fails backwards compatibility.  At Cadence Design Systems, we tried to
> have homedirs mounted from autofs, and had many failures as users tried
> to use their homedirs from various RHEL and SLED systems having
> different versions of GNOME.  The failure symptom typically manifested
> as the user session terminating immediately upon login until sysadmins
> mv'd the user's dotfiles / dotfile directories.
>
> The eventual solution was to cease using GNOME.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 19:52:02 -0800
> From: Ken Shaffer <kenshaffer80 at gmail.com>
> To: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Cc: sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting)
> Message-ID:
>         <CAAMNwFGfY77EBvfLuNcxqtCwc_5zRf54=
> c-XgMAJkWbRY2X8nw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> As was pointed out, trying to share a uers's actual home directory
> across distributions is problematic, so what Tom and I did was to
> mount the extra partition as /usr/local/data, and just have a symlink
> from Tom's home directory to there.  If you really want, you can other
> links for Documents, Downloads, etc.  Having a system independent
> place for your stuff give you great flexiblity in changing/testing
> systems, letting each system have its own home location for storing
> its dot files (.config, .cache, .local, .gnome, etc.).
>
> Ken
>
> On 3/5/18, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> > Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):
> >
> >> 2. When you boot into another distro, some applications will be at a
> >> different version, and that can cause config file problems. For
> >> instance, if you run Firefox, or Gnome, or KDE, when you reboot into
> >> a different distro, Firefox will want to rewrite a bunch of config
> >> files to reflect the current version. So every time you reboot
> >> you'll be shifting back and forth between versions and probably
> >> eventually your config files will probably get messed up.
> >
> > I can confirm that this is a big problem with GNOME, particularly since
> > that DE makes the contents of its dotfiles and dotfile directories, by
> > policy, be forward-compatible (to later releases of GNOME), but often
> > fails backwards compatibility.  At Cadence Design Systems, we tried to
> > have homedirs mounted from autofs, and had many failures as users tried
> > to use their homedirs from various RHEL and SLED systems having
> > different versions of GNOME.  The failure symptom typically manifested
> > as the user session terminating immediately upon login until sysadmins
> > mv'd the user's dotfiles / dotfile directories.
> >
> > The eventual solution was to cease using GNOME.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> > http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
> > Information about SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/<br>
> > Related Information <br>
> > http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/<br>
> > http://explainshell.com/ <br>
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 20:11:05 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] /home on separate partition (was Sunday meeting)
> Message-ID: <20180306041105.GY21779 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Quoting Ken Shaffer (kenshaffer80 at gmail.com):
>
> > As was pointed out, trying to share a uers's actual home directory
> > across distributions is problematic, so what Tom and I did was to
> > mount the extra partition as /usr/local/data, and just have a symlink
> > from Tom's home directory to there.  If you really want, you can other
> > links for Documents, Downloads, etc.  Having a system independent
> > place for your stuff give you great flexiblity in changing/testing
> > systems, letting each system have its own home location for storing
> > its dot files (.config, .cache, .local, .gnome, etc.).
>
> Excellent solution!
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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>
> End of sf-lug Digest, Vol 401, Issue 1
> **************************************
>
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