Symlink to /home ?

ponder

ponder

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I intend doing a fresh install soon but I would like to know if I created no /home partition but instead decided to rather symlink the home folder within / to a 1TB /data/home partition would that be possible?

Intention is to create a 15GB / partition with a home folder (no seperate partiton) /dev/sda3 (sda1&2 is windows10 partitions) and then just have a 1TB drive with a single partition labled as data.
 
possible yes.

Off the top of my head, issues which may arise:
1. If the 1TB fails to mount for some reason, programs looking for /home will fail whereas normal mounting will leave a directory.
2. If you plan on using samba, you will need the "follow symlinks" directive for your home folder. Last I checked /etc/passwd can be accessed thru this.

Talking about /etc/passwd, you can change your home directory there to wherever you want.
 
You do not need a seperate partition for /home. If you do not create one then /home will just be a seperate folder on your root partition.

If you do want /home to be one a separate partition then you can change /etc/fstab to mount /home on this partition. Hell if you want you can even mount a nfs at /home and have your home partition located on a NAS somewhere.

I dont see the point of mounting a separate partition as /data and then symlinking it to /home - it will just get messy, but it will work and you can do it if you want without any issues.
 
Symlinking should work just fine.

atunguyd said:
I dont see the point of mounting a separate partition as /data and then symlinking it to /home - it will just get messy, but it will work and you can do it if you want without any issues.
Click to expand...
He is symlinking /home to /data/home where /data is another hard drive. Then in /data he could still have other folders thats not part of /home.
 
Tinuva said:
Symlinking should work just fine.


He is symlinking /home to /data/home where /data is another hard drive. Then in /data he could still have other folders thats not part of /home.
Click to expand...

At least somebody gets it :D
 
ponder said:
No no, input is appreciated. A few people here did not seem to understand the question or what it was I'm trying to do.
Click to expand...

Its fine, I'm just looking for every opportunity to shoehorn my favourite sitcom into a discussion :D
 
the install process will create a /home/user in most cases

however you can just edit /etc/fstab so that /home or /home/user points to another place
 
why not just mount the 1TB as /data (or whatever you choose to name it)

on my mbp, /Volumes/NT/ (about 100GB). Works because it is an NTFS drive shared between OSX and Debian
on my desktop, also have a large NTFS drive shared between different Linux distros, Windows and a Hackintosh

each OS will have it in a different place, but the info is there across OS
 
or edit /etc/passwd and change the users home dir to something like /data/home/ponder .
 
dade said:
or edit /etc/passwd and change the users home dir to something like /data/home/ponder .
Click to expand...

This would be the neatest solution.
Command: usermod -d /data/home/ponder ponder
Should be run as root. Will have to log out from user "ponder", and log in again.
I would also create a second user just in case something messed up.
 
If one edits the /etc/passwd file I'm assuming I'll have to manually mv the content of /home/ponder across?
Which includes data & and all the other config (hidden .dot files & folders) related stuff as well?
 
ponder said:
If one edits the /etc/passwd file I'm assuming I'll have to manually mv the content of /home/ponder across?
Which includes data & and all the other config (hidden .dot files & folders) related stuff as well?
Click to expand...

yeah

mkdir /data/home
cp -vr /home/ponder /data/home
 
add to fstab

/data/home /home/ none defaults,bind 0 0

Though i think a Seperate partition is the way to go, if for some reason /data does not mount you will have issues
 
Last edited:
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