[NTLUG:Discuss] Moving /home

[Steve Baker]

Kathleen Weaver wrote:
> 
> I want to move my home directories (with files in them), to a different
> hard drive.  I already found out that just setting the new drive to have a
> mount point of /home doesn't work.  No files, and then I can't get to the
> files.  I tried moving them to a /newhome and then moving then, but then
> they ended up with in a directory /home/home/<username>

You *can* make the trick of mounting a second drive under /home work -
but
IMHO that's "A Bad Idea".

Instead, put your users directories anywhere on either disk that takes
your fancy - and in /home put a bunch of symbolic links to the real
home directories.

 eg
    cd /home
    ln -s /some_other_drive/joe_q_public joe_q_public


Now, you can move home directories around at will - and so long as
you keep the symlink in /home pointing at the right place, nobody
will either know or care that you did it.

In the end, you'll find that you run out of disk space and your users
will have to spread over multiple drives so you'll be *FORCED* to do
something like this.  Do it now and save yourself the hassle later.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)