reorganizing /home's

[Michael Hennebry]

On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Craig White wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 12:13 -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:
>> I'm dual booting F9 and F11.
>> There is a partition that mounts on F9:/home and on F11:/home.
>> I suspect that my ~/.* directories are stepping on each other.
>> I want to reorganize so that the to-be-former home partition
>> mounts on F9:/homes and on F11:/homes.
>> F9:/home would be a symbolic link to /homes/F9.
>> F11:/home would be a symbolic link to /homes/F11.
>> User fred would have home directories with canonical names
>> /homes/F9/fred and /homes/F11/fred .
>> Each would have a symbolic link to /homes/fred,
>> his old home directory.
>>
>> Once upon a time, I would boot from a live CD,
>> reorganize the directories, and edit the fstabs.
>> IIRC fstabs now get rewritten at boot time.
>> Mere hand editing won't do the trick.
>> What will do the trick?
>>
>> Also, is there a way to use labels instead of those awful UUIDs?
>> I concede their usefullness if one has
>> a lot of disks or a lot of turnover.
>> I have four disks.
> ----
> first, the fact that you are dual booting F9 and F11 demonstrates the
> need to use UUID's

I don't get the connection.
Why not labels?

> second - if you want to muck around with /home, probably better to just
> mount and 'bind' mount (see 'man mount') because then you won't have
> issues with things like selinux but remember that you will have to edit
> the 'users' $HOME in /etc/passwd to reflect the change for each
> installation...
>
> (assuming /home/Fedora11/ is where users home folders are)

On F11, /home will be a symbolic link to /homes/F11
fred's home directory will be /homes/F11/fred aka /home/fred .

> i.e.
>
> mkdir /home/F9
> mkdir /home/F11
>
> edit /etc/fstab
> /home/Fedora11 /home/F11   bind,rw  0 0
>
> edit /etc/fstab (dangerous) might want to use system tools to do this
> craig:x:500:500:Craig White:/home/F11/craig:/bin/bash

This suggests to me that I did not remember correctly,
i.e. the boot sequence will not write over fstab.
Is that correct?
Will the boot sequence leave fstab alone?

> I'd probably forget about symbolic links but you might be able to make
> them work

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Optimist:   The glass is half full.
Engineer:   The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."