Where do you place your graph files? ...and root home?

[Jorge Fabregas]

Hello everyone,

I know it's irrelevant where you place your graph files (fbackup) but I would like to know, where do you usually place them?

I'm trying to place things on their "appropiate" place following Unix filesystem standards. I've seen many examples where people place them in /tmp.... which I don't think it's appropiate. What do you think about /var/adm/graphs ?

Also, do you think the root user should have a home dir other than /? In Linux, the root user home usually is /root. I know I can change root's home from / to /root but...I wonder why HP-UX does it this way? Any good reason for having root's home in /?

Thanks in advance,
Jorge Fábreg

[Rajeev Shukla]

They should surely not be kept in /tmp
Graph file is the configuration file for and in unix /etc is the directory holding all configuration files.
A good idea would be to create a directory under /etc and keep all your graph files for fbackup there.

Even i am not sure why by default root doesn't have /root as home. But its a good indea to have a separate home directory of root than using "/".

Cheers
Rajeev

[Michael Tully · Accepted solution]

I have a number of systems where we need to use 'fbackup'. We keep the whole thing under it's own hierarchy.

/usr/local/backup
/usr/local/backup/log (log files)
/usr/local/backup/etc (graph files)
/usr/local/backup/bin (scripts)

I don't see any problem with using /var/adm as a hierarchy directory tree.

Yes I believe that / should not be used as 'root' home directory. Generally the recommendation is to use /root which is stil under / but you can limit who goes in there by ther directory permissions (700).

[Bhuvaneswari Selvaraj]

Hi,
/var/adm is mostly used for logs and other things that are mostly used by administrators.
It makes more sense to have the graph file in /etc directory.

However, if u r referring to the backup of the graph files, it is better if it is in your usual backup dir (usually this is in the filesystem which has more space).

[Graham Cameron_1]

root has historically had its home directory as "/" since the beginning of unix time.
It can be a very bad idea, as some sysadmins here found out.
They had a cleanup script which sent something like:

cd $CLEANUPDIR
rm -r *

AS you might guess, one one occasion, CLEANUPDIR was set to null, the root script cd'd to "/", and trashed the entire filesystem. If roots home had been "/root", only a handful of files would have ben trashed.
Moral of the story - always move root home away from its default of "/".

-- Graham