/usr/home vs /home

[David Cornejo]

Hi,

In the old days home was typically a separate partition that was
mounted on /home. If you didn't have a partition the installer would
create /usr/home and symlink /home to it. The root was also typically
an independent partition, so it made sense not to clutter it up with
home directories.

Now that the default behavior is to use one big partition, the
installer defaults to /usr/home + symlink.

I've always liked the more succinct /home and was wondering if there
is any reason why not to delete the symlink and move home to / to
mimic the old many partition style?

thanks,
dave c
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[Martin Sugioarto]

Am Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:15:36 -1000
schrieb David Cornejo <da...@dogwood.com>:

> I've always liked the more succinct /home and was wondering if there
> is any reason why not to delete the symlink and move home to / to
> mimic the old many partition style?

Hi David,

I like the idea of having /usr/home better, because if you don't want
to have a separate partition for homes, you would at least have a huge
partition (/usr) and won't run out of space quickly. If you
create /home, you'll assign the rootfs space to users without a home
partitions and rootfs is typically small.

FreeBSD is totally fine with /home mountpoint. It won't work
differently.

I consider the installer procedure as a quick way to install FreeBSD.
It is for people who want to try something. And you don't want to have
all these "help! my rootfs is full!" support questions and explain the
same thing over and over again.

I think, I'm not alone when I say that I prepare the disks myself
instead of using the installer. I don't even know if the new installer
will be capable of installing FreeBSD like I have it installed now.

--
Martin

["Thomas Muelle...@bellsouth.net]

> In the old days home was typically a separate partition that was
> mounted on /home. If you didn't have a partition the installer would
> create /usr/home and symlink /home to it. The root was also typically
> an independent partition, so it made sense not to clutter it up with
> home directories.

> Now that the default behavior is to use one big partition, the
> installer defaults to /usr/home + symlink.

> I've always liked the more succinct /home and was wondering if there
> is any reason why not to delete the symlink and move home to / to
> mimic the old many partition style?

> thanks,
> dave c

My preference is to use the traditional /home, on a separate partition. That way, user data can be kept safe in the case of a major upgrading or revamping of the system.

This principle is even applicable for MS-Windows, even if the user-data partition is not called "home".

A Linux user can run two or more distributions sharing the same /home with each other, but not the same /home as for FreeBSD because of different file system.

bsdinstall on FreeBSD 9.0-BETA1 changed my /home to a symlink to /usr/home, but I changed it back to my preference.

I read that PC-BSD considers /usr/home to be correct.

I agree with Martin Sugioarto <mar...@sugioarto.com> on preparing the disks myself rather than letting the installer do it. bsdinstall only made things more difficult for partitioning the disk, not allowing enough space, and also bsdinstall's boot partition was nonfunctional for me.

But I don't see any advantage to putting /, /usr, and /var on separate partitions.

Tom

[Hendrik Hasenbein]

This might not be an universal advantage, but it is good to keep the
choice. For example / could reside on a small flash memory built-in on
the mainboard. /usr and /homes are mounted from different fileservers
and /var is on a usb flash drive inside the case, because / is already
filled.

mata ne,
Hendrik

[O. Hartmann]

Substantially it is irrelevant where the home-directory resides as long
as it doesn't have any serious performance implications or anything
else. Our homes resides on a dedicated ZFS volume and are mounted on
/home since many Linux systems we use for HPC duties also expect their
homes "by default" at /home.

But there is indeed on critical issue. In some cases where it is allowed
to log in as a user even no home folder could be mounted - say due to a
failure of the ZFS subsystem or due to failure of mounting from a
NAS/SAN or other kind of server - the "dead" mountpoint as empty as it
is resides in the "/" filesystem which is usually very small. We/I
preferr to use a legacy traditional partitioning of the directory
structure with fixed partitions for /, var,/ var/tmp, /usr, /usr/local,
/usr/obj, /usr/src and /usr/ports. It is, indeed, a huge waste of space,
but under some critical circumstances it is much easier and more healthy
for the system to "repair" only one partition with a subset of data than
a mega-partition containing everything.
well, in such a case, with a small "/", users are able to fill up, by
accident or by intention, "/" which then could end up in a stuck system
(if /tmp is also residing as a folder and not a partition in /). Havin
the homes in /usr/home or even /usr/local/home (latter seems more
logical to me since /usr is SYSTEM, and except root's home everything
else is a local issue, also the additional homes for users).

Regards,
Oliver

[C. P. Ghost]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 11:30 AM, <"Thomas Mueller
<mueller6727"@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> But I don't see any advantage to putting /, /usr, and /var on separate partitions.
>
> Tom

Regarding separate /usr and /var: the advantage is that you can
keep /usr read-only which is also important for security reasons
since modifying system binaries becomes less easy.

Furthermore, you can NFS share a read-only /usr among many
similar machines, while /var is a per-machine specific read-write
area.

-cpghost.

--
Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/

[O. Hartmann]

On 11/24/11 10:42, krad wrote:

> I always have /var and /tmp on separate file systems than /, but dont
> normally have a separate /usr, bur I have a /usr/local.
>
> I like to keep the /var and /tmp fs separate as they as other are
> mentioned. Therefore they are more prone to corruption in event of the
> power failure. Keeping / separate in this case should make the system more
> likely to reboot. Also it stops application filling up / which can stop you
> logging into the system (I havent seen this issue for year admittedly)
>
> /usr/local is just for tidyness as it keeps base os separate from ports etc
>
> I also have /home on a separate as well to stops users filling up root as
> well.
>
> my zfsroot boxes have this setup as well, but i also add a few reservations
> and quotas.

For my experiences in the past with OpenLDAP, which keeps its databases
by default in /var, I had a lot of inconsistencies triggered due to the
port OpenLDAP itself or DB4. I do not care about who caused the
inconsistency, but after a reboot, the /var filesystem had to be fsck'ed
or was completely trunkated and needed to be reformatted. If this
happens to /var when /var is a part of / as a whole, then good night ...
;-) Sorry for the sloppy statement.
I'd like to know how many big-company-server systems do have separated
partitions and a lucky to have an easy way to repair in compare to home
users with their home boxes using a linux like whole one partition ...
and compared to that the failures and times to repair the filesystem.

Regards,
Oliver