24 Sep
2005
24 Sep
'05
7:26 a.m.
Hi,
I wonder: nowadays most unices have their homedirectories in /home.
Minix however used to have its homedirectories in /usr. Did "real"
unices used to have the homedirectories their as well? Can someone tell
something about how that evolved? I'm probably to young to know (31).
Bert
24 Sep
24 Sep
8:23 a.m.
Bert Thomas wrote:
Hi,
I wonder: nowadays most unices have their homedirectories in /home.
Minix however used to have its homedirectories in /usr. Did "real"
unices used to have the homedirectories their as well? Can someone tell
something about how that evolved? I'm probably to young to know (31).
as I recall, all unix's up through bsd would default to putting users
in /usr. I think when sun went diskless with nfs they started moving
user dirs out of /usr.
certainly when things like automounter became popular (mostly on suns
as I remember) alternate pathnames for user dir popped up.
I would claim that all bsd and pre-bsd's used /usr for home dirs.
-brad
8:55 a.m.
Minix however used to have its homedirectories in
/usr. Did "real"
unices used to have the homedirectories their as well?
This is actually a matter mostly of partitioning. On a system with
a small number of spindles, "/usr" was usually the largest disk/partition,
and most users had their home directories there (this tradition continues
with many commercial Unices).
On a system with a large number of users and spindles, very often
there were multiple root directories used for home directories. For
example there would be a disk mounted as /users1 and it would
have user's home directories of /users1/aaron and /users1/able and
/users1/acton etc., and then there would be a disk mounted as /users2
and it would have a bunch of home directories on it, etc.
Other places would mount these as /usr/users1/aaron, /usr/users1/able,
etc., keeping up the tradition of having them under the "/usr" umbrella.
Sometimes all the disparate spindles were hidden by making links
from a common /usr/users or /users directory to the
spindle/directory
where the home directory really resided. This is much nicer if
you're
gonna be migrating to larger disks someday.
Many of the inconvenient things of spindles and mount points we no
longer do if not necessary. I suppose /home is a good point to start
at and then if necessary use link to the actually partition where the
user's home directory resides.
For some reason, the old way of partitioning unix systems still lives
on although the need for multiple mount points and spindles doesn't
matter much in a world of multi-hundred-Gbyte disks. I suppose
it's like "always make your swap partition twice the size of physical
memory" even though the rationale behind that recommendation was
stale 15 years ago and is much more stale today!
Partitions do come in handy for many reasons of convenience, but
most of the stale recommendations are more of an inconvenience now.
Tim.
9:15 a.m.
At 07:55 AM 9/24/2005, Tim Shoppa wrote:
Partitions do come in handy for many reasons of
convenience, but
most of the stale recommendations are more of an inconvenience now.
But the concept of putting all the user's data in a single place
and not all over the drive and mixed-in with executables, that's
still relevant.
Just yesterday, like many times before, I was helping a client try to
grasp all the subtle info we'd need to know to back-up and restore a
home Windows PC. Where does every app put its data and settings?
In a file? In the registry? Quickbooks defaults to putting company
files in its Program Files directory, Outlook hides its files under
the user's My Documents tree, you can't drag My Documents to WinXP's
CD-writing window because it puts all its temp files there, too,
and gets confused because you're asking to recurse, so you curse, etc.
- John
10:19 a.m.
Rumor has it that Tim Shoppa may have mentioned these words:
> Minix however used to have its homedirectories in
/usr. Did "real"
> unices used to have the homedirectories their as well?
[[ snippety ]]
<MODE="rant" TYPE="General, not at Tim">
[[ Oh, waitaminit - maybe I should have just put 'snip' in there as
'snippety' isn't really a word, like stuph really isn't a word, and now
someone's going to gig (as in military gig, as in point out my errors, not
the computer gig) my spelling and whine about the fact that I'm not using
100% perfect grammar 100% of the time. Next, the non-words 'automagically'
and 'frobnicate' will get me kicked off the list too!!! :-O ]]
Get over it, willya? Sheesh. If you don't care for a particular person's
grammar (or lack thereof) that's why you have a delete key.
</MODE>
'Nuff said.
For some reason, the old way of partitioning unix
systems still lives
on although the need for multiple mount points and spindles doesn't
matter much in a world of multi-hundred-Gbyte disks....
That's a blanket statement that's *just plain wrong.* There are still a
*lot* of reasons to divvy up spindles, and the primary one off the top of
my head is a *nix mailserver. If the home directories are on the same
spindle as the queue directory is on the same spindle as the SQL data, the
hard drive spends all it's time seeking and very little time actually
finding, and the server will grind to a halt with a relatively few users,
and the CPU just twiddling it's thumbs. Multiple spindles on a technology
where each spindle can be communicated with separately (read: SCSI) makes
much more efficient use of rotational memory.
It depends on where your bottlenecks are.
I suppose
it's like "always make your swap partition twice the size of physical
memory" even though the rationale behind that recommendation was
stale 15 years ago and is much more stale today!
10 years ago, I used to set my swap to 3x my RAM, and quite often used it.
Albeit more slowly, but I did have a genuine need for that.
I have more money now than 10 years ago, so I generally only set swap equal
to available RAM, but even now I've been known to run out of swap on (rare)
occasion.
Again, it depends on the individual users' needs.
Partitions do come in handy for many reasons of
convenience, but
most of the stale recommendations are more of an inconvenience now.
Admin a few mailservers, and then call me when you change your mind. I'll
happily buy you a beer then. (Hell, I'll get you ripped! [UK: pissed!]
Sometimes alcohol is the only way I can keep my sanity with all the
phishing / scams / spams / etc. I deal with on a daily basis.)
But it pays the bills... mostly. ;-)
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com. |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
10:48 a.m.
On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 08:55:28 -0400
shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com (Tim Shoppa) wrote:
disk/partition,
Minix however
used to have its homedirectories in /usr. Did "real"
unices used to have the homedirectories their as well?
This is actually a matter mostly of partitioning. On a system with
a small number of spindles, "/usr" was usually the largest
and most users had their home directories there (this
tradition
continues
with many commercial Unices).
On a system with a large number of users and spindles, very often
there were multiple root directories used for home directories. For
example there would be a disk mounted as /users1 and it would
have user's home directories of /users1/aaron and /users1/able and
/users1/acton etc., and then there would be a disk mounted as /users2
and it would have a bunch of home directories on it, etc.
Other places would mount these as /usr/users1/aaron, /usr/users1/able,
etc., keeping up the tradition of having them under the "/usr"
umbrella.
Sometimes all the disparate spindles were hidden by making links
from a common /usr/users or /users directory to the spindle/directory
where the home directory really resided. This is much nicer if you're
gonna be migrating to larger disks someday.
Many of the inconvenient things of spindles and mount points we no
longer do if not necessary. I suppose /home is a good point to start
at and then if necessary use link to the actually partition where the
user's home directory resides.
For some reason, the old way of partitioning unix systems still lives
on although the need for multiple mount points and spindles doesn't
matter much in a world of multi-hundred-Gbyte disks. I suppose
it's like "always make your swap partition twice the size of physical
memory" even though the rationale behind that recommendation was
stale 15 years ago and is much more stale today!
It is actually a reliability/security mechanism to split the system's
filesystems over multiple partitions. If you put the user-writable
directories in the same spot as critical system things, a runaway
user-level process (or just a drive space hog user) that fills the drive
is less likely to crash the system by using up space the system needs.
11:12 a.m.
At 8:55 AM -0400 9/24/05, Tim Shoppa wrote:
On a system with a large number of users and spindles,
very often
there were multiple root directories used for home directories. For
example there would be a disk mounted as /users1 and it would
have user's home directories of /users1/aaron and /users1/able and
/users1/acton etc., and then there would be a disk mounted as /users2
and it would have a bunch of home directories on it, etc.
In large Unix environments this can still be the case. Sure most
users have their own Unix box, or share one with a few others, but
the home directories are out in NFS. That way people can access
their home directory from any system. We typically use
/foo/bar/username, and have dozens of home directory disks, spread
over dozens of multi-terabyte fileservers.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
2:36 p.m.
Bert Thomas wrote:
Hi,
I wonder: nowadays most unices have their homedirectories in /home.
Minix however used to have its homedirectories in /usr. Did "real"
unices used to have the homedirectories their as well? Can someone tell
something about how that evolved? I'm probably to young to know (31).
I suspect /home /usr and other large directories were on seperate hard
drives on real unix. Minix started from just floppy disks if I remember
right.
Bert
Ben alias woodelf
6872
days inactive
6872
days old
7 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
bert＠brothom.nl -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
brad＠heeltoe.com -
chenmel＠earthlink.net -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
shoppa_classiccmp＠trailing-edge.com -
zmerch＠30below.com