topic Re: changing root's home in Operating System - HP-UX

changing root's home

Fred Martin_1 — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 09:52:09 GMT

I'm about to change root's home from / to /homeroot.

Can I do this 'on the fly' without troubles, or do I need a reboot, etc?

Re: changing root's home

A. Clay Stephenson — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 09:56:27 GMT

You can change it BUT only those processes started after the change will be aware of the change. The more "standard" name is /root rather than /homeroot but that is up to you.

Re: changing root's home

G. Vrijhoeven — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 09:56:51 GMT

Hi Fred,

Yes you can if it is also mounted in /

copy .???* files to roots new home dir.
vipw to add the passwd file
and log in again.

Regards,

Gideon

PS mind the right on roots home dir ( .ssh etc.

Re: changing root's home

Pete Randall — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 09:57:09 GMT

Fred,

I can't imagine why you couldn't do it on the fly. You will eventually want to make sure you can reboot and log in and all, but, for now, just go ahead and switch it and change the /etc/passwd entry.

Pete

Re: changing root's home

Prashant Zanwar_4 — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 09:57:53 GMT

There are no problems with this. You can acheive this using SAM in better way.
You have to take care of the scripts which might be using earlier home of root. for that for now you can create a link to old root home.

Using SAM change root home.

ln -s

This should take care of scripts also which call your root home.
Then over a period of time you can change whereever you are using it.

I have practised it in my setup.

Thanks
Prashant

Re: changing root's home

Robert-Jan Goossens_1 — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:00:57 GMT

Hi Fred,

It is better to use /root. I n case you need to boot in single user mode /home is not available. Create a dir in the root name root.

drwx------ 5 root sys 1024 Sep 29 17:31 root

mv your .profile to /root
edit your profile to change settings to /root. ( like .sh_history )

HISTFILE=${HOME}/.sh_history_`who am i|awk '{ print $1}'`

change root in the passwd file to the new /root homedir.

Regards,
Robert-Jan

Re: changing root's home

Prashant Zanwar_4 — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:01:28 GMT

Yes before you go for a link create just do

cp -pr /root/* /homeroot

then
mv /root /rootold
ln -s /homeroot /root

This works perfectly.

Thanks
Prashant

Re: changing root's home

Marco Santerre — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:01:35 GMT

I always change my root's home into /root as soon as I set up a new server. It is recommended that you do that as well. There is no issue in changing the home of root as long as you make sure that all the . files follow and, as mentionned previously, only those processes started after the change will be impacted.

Re: changing root's home

Fred Martin_1 — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:05:13 GMT

Thanks all.

I was thinking of /homeroot as I saw it in an HP-UX manual, someplace. If /root is more commonly used then I'll do that.

Fred

p.s. Robert-Jan, I was planning on using /homeroot, not /home/root. I agree, it should be in the root file system, not /home.

Re: changing root's home

Ralph Grothe — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:31:04 GMT

Although all what needs to be done has been said already I'd just like to add

create an new dir in / filesystem (so it is accessible from miniroot in maintenance mode)

mkdir -m 0700 /root

An easy way to move the dot files to the new home is by letting the shell glob them

cd / && mv .[!.]* /root

Change the 6th field in /etc/passwd to the new home by editing /etc/passwd with "vipw" (takes care of advisory file locking)

then logout and in again.

Re: changing root's home

Fred Martin_1 — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:35:07 GMT

Thanks for all the information.