Re: Home Directory on External Drive

[Cédric Lucantis <omer@no-log.org>]

> I want to keep my home directory on an external drive and move it between
> computers as required.

First, make sure that your users on the different computers have the same 
uid/gid (edit /etc/passwd and /etc/group for that).

>
> 1. It is asking for super-user privileges to mount it. How can I avoid
> this?

Use the 'users' mount options, but mounting/unmounting your own home when 
you're logged is probably not a good idea.

>
> 2. Should I place "/home/masatran", or "/home", on the drive?

This is your choice here. With /home, you'll have the homes of all your users 
on your drive (except if some have their home elsewhere, of course). You 
probably want the other choice.

>
> 3. How can I get it to use the external drive as my home directory during
> login, for the application data, etc.?
>
> 4. I read somewhere that the external drive must be named for the links to
> remain permanent. Is this correct? How do I name it?

Not sure I understood those two points, but you should give a label to your 
drive (if it's an ext3 filesystem, do 'e2label /dev/xxx NAME') and use an 
fstab entry like this:

LABEL=NAME	/home/masatran	ext3	defaults

It will then be mounted automatically at boot time.

-- 
Cédric Lucantis