Move /Homes to different pool?

Support
1

I want to move my /Homes folder (with the Homes folder for 100+ users) to a different storage system, it’s currently on an array and takes up almost 12 TB of data.

How best to move it?

2

For single users, you could use the usermod (e.g. usermod -m -d /newhome/username username). However, if you then create new users under the Rockstor WebUI, the default will still be /home, I think. and doing this for 100+ users might be a bit cumbersome.

So, you probably want to do a move of the home contents to a new partition (not the /home directory itself, though) and then mount the “new home” into the /home folder …

1 Like
3

Thanks for this. It’s interesting but I’m not sure it will accomplish what I want. I want to be able to retire the Pool which has /Homes.

To be clear, these are not local Rockstor users, these are Active Directory users. Moving the data is easy but then I need to:

  • maintain/recreate the shares with all permissions
  • set it so new user Home shares are created correctly.

Many thanks for any info or guidance!

4

Ah, that seems to be more complicated then.

Just for completeness, on my comment above:

You can actually change the default setting in this file:

/etc/default/useradd

The defaults are something like this:

# useradd defaults file
GROUP=100
HOME=/home
INACTIVE=-1
EXPIRE=
SHELL=/bin/bash
SKEL=/etc/skel
USRSKEL=/usr/etc/skel
CREATE_MAIL_SPOOL=yes

so, making changes here, will at least address the local user creation defaults.

Though that doesn’t help your challenge with the active directory users.

If I read correctly, for new authenticated users you can override the defaults also using the /etc/realmd.conf file with e.g.:

[users]
default-home = /home/%U
default-shell = /bin/bash

But there seems to be a different approach for new users if already joined to the realm, which involves adding overrides to the sssd.conf file.

Moving the home directories while preserving permissions and other attributes, you could use mv or possibly even rsync but this might be different on OpenSUSE, so testing would be important.

This (admittedly old) post suggests rsync with additional flag on preserving acls, etc. as mv might change the owner:group:

You could decide to not use the “–remove-source-files” since you’re planning on retiring the original home location.