Re: How to put files at a location determined at install-time.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 07:09:41PM +0100, Marc L. de Bruin wrote:
> On my system, I have hde1 (mounted as /), and md0 (hde2+hdg1, mounted as
> /raid1). The home-dirs are on /raid1/home and I have a symlink /home ->
> /raid1/home (this probably is a bad thing, I know).
No, this isn't necessarily bad. However, why don't you specify the location of
your home directories for specific accounts in your /etc/passwd, and specify
your default home directory in the user management utilities? If you use
/raid1/home as your home directory, you won't need to rely upon symbolic links
and your applications will have one less system call to make for each home
directory file access.
Alternatively, look into Linux LVM (http://www.sistina.com/lvm). It's current
release is quite up to date in the 2.4.16+ kernels, and I believe there's a
current package in Debian for lvm tools. You can logically manage your raid1
partition into multiple, growable/shrinkable logical paritions/filesystems.
Also, you could use the mount --bind option to use 2.4.x VFS.
bash# mount --bind /raid1/home /home
> So, the root-user might want the files to be physically installed on
> /raid1, e.g. /raid1/mydata, so that a user "blah" (/raid1/home/blah) can
> make a hardlink from /raid1/home/blah/afile to /raid1/mydata/afile.
This sounds like a broken software package if it depends upon hardlinks.
Hardlinks should be used with caution and only under specific circumstances. A
good example is linking a file under multiple directories on the same
filesystem when the directories are used as a form of data organization. (For
example, the MH Rand email format.)
Additionally, user home directories should not be touched by a Debian
installation package. When the user uses this application, why does it not
search a predefined path for files? Is there no $APPSHARE variable or
configuration option for a user-based RC file (~/.<apprc>)? Is there no
default RC file for the application in /etc/<package>/<config>?
Could you provide the user with this functionality? Could upstream?
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr
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