Home : should it be part of vg00 ??

[Q4you]

Folks,

If you have to create a home file system, where would you create ? inside vg00 or external storage ? given that "home" requirement is appx 4G, vg00 disks are 15k rpm, 36G drives. External storage is EMC/XP.

Pl give reason for and against...

TIA

Q

[A. Clay Stephenson]

It depends. If /home is used to keep .profiles and SMALL amounts of user data then keep it in vg00 but otherwise store it elsewhere.

In any event, it should be a separate filesystem so that moving it is easy. vg00 should be kept clean and small so that OS upgrades are easy.

[avsrini]

Hi Q,
When your home lv size is 4GB, then I prefer to put it on XP / EMC. It solves 2 main problems. Performance and Reliability. You'll get the performance with XP and Data protection from these HA's RAID config's.

But try keeping root's home dir in / filesystem itself.
You will require this when you boot into single user mode or lv maintenance mode.


Srini.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

It depends on the situation and for all the practical purposes, I keep it on the external disk so that it can be easily imported during upgrades/failures of root disk.

If it is on the root disk and if you want to upgrade the OS (say from 11 to 11i), then you will need to restore /home from the backups which means extra time and effort.

-Sri

[Michael Tully]

Ideally you would want to store something of that size to an external disk array where possible. Where possible I try to minimise the usage of internal disks from as much read IO activity as I can.
The only systems that I have that /dev/vg00 contains /home are on production systems where there is little activity for users (utilsing /home), as most are captive anyway. For development servers, I would recommend /home being somewhere other than in /dev/vg00 and on external disks.

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

given the vg00 is 36 gb vs the reuirement of 4 gb it is better to ahve the home in root disk only , recovery interms of ignite ,etc back ups will be easy . The negative factor is that since the users have acess to /home they can fill it up using their scripts etc which may cause the /home to fill up and give you no room to increase it further .


Manoj Srivastava

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

/home will be under vg00 by default, which is needed during boot time. I don't mind keeping in inetrnal drives or external storage make sure backup is available

[Q4you]

Thanks to all for your reply.

This what I have done ->

1. root's home /home/root in vg00

2. All users home directories on /users/, with "/users" as seperate lv mounted from external storage filesystem on vg01.

[Rajeev Shukla]

The best way is to have a common home directory and use NIS+ or ldapux for authentication. In that case you can make home directory outside vg00 and use automounter to mount on all the servers. You can even use your own password syncronisation scripts if you like. But this helps in having a clean system with common home directory rather that having every where.

Cheers
Rajeev

[Bill Hassell]

/home can be in any volume group. It is not needed in single user mode (not even mounted) but this is not a problem for root even if /home/root is the HOME directory. Treat /home just like any other data disk since it is not part of the OS.

[Ralph Grothe]

As already said by many others,
I would think it's absolutely up to you whether you prefer to have the /home filesystem on a separat disk or an vg00 disk.
In fact other OS like Solaris are a bit esoteric in that respect, which I had to realize when getting my hands on for the first time on a Solaris box.
Despite that "useradd -D" per default had set /home I wasn't even able to create an account with the -m switch nor could I even create a single directory thereon.
It took me a while until I realized that the Solaris phylosophy was to use /export/home for users' directories and data, and that a separat disk should be nfs-mounted on that mount point (which of course is not mandatory)