martin f krafft [u] wrote on 10/10/2004 15:11:
I have an unclarity about the $HOME of daemon users in hook scripts: If there is no directory that we could call $HOME for the daemon, what to do? --no-create-home is definitely needed, and not specifying --home yields /home/$DAEMON in /etc/passwd, which is nonexistant. Is that preferred, or should something like /nonexistant be used instead? Thanks for any answers or pointers. The policy does not seem to care about this. And neither does devel-ref state something along the lines.
Most system users seem to set their home directory to the variable data path their daemon uses. www-data uses /var/www, irc uses /var/run/ircd, sshd uses /var/run/sshd. However hacluster (heartbeat) uses /tmp. /tmp is also the recommended home directory for system users on Mandrake and Redhat IIRC. If the daemon doesn't have any run-time data which would belong in /var/lib or /var/spool, I would say use /tmp.
Regards, Sven