changing root's home

[Fred Martin_1]

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?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

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.

[G. Vrijhoeven]

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.

[Pete Randall]

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

[Prashant Zanwar_4]

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

[Robert-Jan Goossens_1]

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

[Prashant Zanwar_4]

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

[Marco Santerre]

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.

[Fred Martin_1]

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.

[Ralph Grothe]

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.

[Fred Martin_1]

Thanks for all the information.