| gabriel rosenkoetter on Tue, 2 Apr 2002 22:24:08 -0500 |
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On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 08:22:49PM -0500, Fred K Ollinger wrote: > I like it b/c I can reformat my other partitions completely and install a > diff distro of linux if I need to. YMMV, though, Gabriel, I usually agree > w/ everything you say, but this time, I'm a bit confused. I think that a > separate /home on a workstation is pretty obvious in its usefulness. Hell, > I'd even like to get several distros all shareing the same /home, but > that's not what most people do, I guess. I have heard similar args made > for logging in as root, only, all the time. Not what I'd do, but I'm not > going to try and stop someone. It's their workstation. Well, if I'm setting up a workstation for some random user at a workplace, there isn't going to be a whole lot of repartitioning or multiple-distribution use. Also, it's quite likely that their home directory wouldn't even reside on their local machine, but on my NFS server (as referenced by my NIS master, of which their machine is a client when its given to them). So /home would REALLY not be used on that machine unless it was without a network. (In which case I'd be dealing with bigger emergencies than a user without a home directory, probably.) But that's a seprate argument from the one I made previously. Different distributions (or even different operating systems: make that partition FAT32 and all of Windows, Linux, and BSD can store their home directory files there, and Linux and BSD will probably use the same files; yes, mounting ext2 works just fine under BSD... don't think ext3fs is quite perfect yet, but it's been a LONG time since I checked) is a very compelling argument, but it's not something I expect people to be doing in an office environment. As for keeping /home across reinstalls... I don't know about you, but I upgrade workstations in-line without reformatting. Any sane installer will do this right, and preserve things like your old /etc if it needs to. (NetBSD going from 1.4 to 1.5 drastically changed its rc structure, meaning you really did want to install the new /etc stuff. If you did your upgrade through sysinst, the standard NetBSD installer, you still had everything you should--say, Sendmail or Postfix settings--in /etc.old. At no point does a NetBSD upgrade repartition anything.) Installing a different distro over an existing one without reformatting will probably leave more cruft lying around than will upgrading to a newer version of the same distro, but it's unlikely to leave you with a broken system (just a messy one). That is, again, not something I see happening very much on business workstations. Fwiw, the folks doing this kind of thing on macs and PCs, both at my current workplace and at my previous academic institutions, are typically upgrading a users' *hardware* at the same time, which makes the issue getting a user's files off their old drive onto the new, clean one, rather than keeping the files around. (Swapping the disks in is typically a bad idea, since replacement schedules run on the scale of two or three years, which means that newer, faster drives come in the new computer for less than the old drive cost.) -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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