Movement of /Users to different location

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Movement of /Users to different location

Post by shuman » Fri Dec 07, 2012 10:54 am

When I look at the hierarchy of OS X filesystem it has something like

/Volumes/drivename/Users and then proceeds to mount Users at /Users. I've seen a lot of topics, and have myself done this, about creating a symlink to a different location for /Volumes such as:

Code: Select all
ln -s /Volumes/zfsFS/Users /Volumes/LionHD/Users
where zfsFS is a zfs filesystem.

My question is, outside of symlinking is there a way to tell os x NOT to do the default, but instead mount my /Volumes/zfsFS/Users @ /Users ?

Is this a bad idea? What are the roadblocks/drawbacks of this method?
- Mac Mini (Late 2012), 10.8.5, 16GB memory, pool - 2 Mirrored 3TB USB 3.0 External Drives
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Re: Movement of /Users to different location

Post by shuman » Fri Dec 07, 2012 11:23 am

I think I found the solution:
http://lnx2mac.blogspot.com/2010/09/moving-os-x-users-to-separate-partition.html

Does anyone here have any experience using this method, good or bad? Maybe the symlink option is a better and easier choice; less prone to os update errors.

Thoughts?
- Mac Mini (Late 2012), 10.8.5, 16GB memory, pool - 2 Mirrored 3TB USB 3.0 External Drives
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Re: Movement of /Users to different location

Post by ghaskins » Fri Dec 07, 2012 11:26 am

shuman wrote:
My question is, outside of symlinking is there a way to tell os x NOT to do the default, but instead mount my /Volumes/zfsFS/Users @ /Users ?



This doesn't exactly answer your question, and you may already be aware of these options, but:

Some alternatives to what you are trying to do are:

1) You can set any user, on a per user basis at least, to use any arbitrary path. It used to be something you could only access through the server tools or command line, but in later releases of OSX its available right in the GUI (go to SysPrefs->Users, right click on the user, select "Advanced", and set the homedir to the path you want).

2) You can use something like LDAP to specify home directory policies, and point it somewhere else (even off box via AFP/NFS, if you wanted). For instance, I have an LDAP server running on my Synology NAS that directs the mac to automount /home via NFS, and all my home dirs are there.

Not sure if any of this helps you, but FYI.

Good luck!
-Greg
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Re: Movement of /Users to different location

Post by ghaskins » Fri Dec 07, 2012 12:12 pm

shuman wrote:I think I found the solution:
http://lnx2mac.blogspot.com/2010/09/moving-os-x-users-to-separate-partition.html

Does anyone here have any experience using this method, good or bad? Maybe the symlink option is a better and easier choice; less prone to os update errors.

Thoughts?


My only advice is, you may want to consider at least having one account (using the per-user homedir tip I mentioned) that is not set to use the new mount point (e.g. perhaps this is in /Admin, a dir on the root-fs) so that you can still easily get in if something goes wrong with the mount. Of course, it would probably still work even if you dont do this, because it would just create a new homedir under the /Users mountpoint, but you would probably have to manually remove this data before you could re-mount the ZFS partition next time. The separate (e.g. /Admin) route is IMO cleaner.
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JHFS+ as the home for at least one admin user

Post by grahamperrin » Fri Dec 07, 2012 9:32 pm

+1
to using JHFS+ as the home for at least one admin user.

Consider safe boot (example), single user mode, and so on.
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Re: Movement of /Users to different location

Post by amteza » Sat Dec 08, 2012 2:39 am

ghaskins wrote:
shuman wrote:I think I found the solution:
http://lnx2mac.blogspot.com/2010/09/moving-os-x-users-to-separate-partition.html

Does anyone here have any experience using this method, good or bad? Maybe the symlink option is a better and easier choice; less prone to os update errors.

Thoughts?


My only advice is, you may want to consider at least having one account (using the per-user homedir tip I mentioned) that is not set to use the new mount point (e.g. perhaps this is in /Admin, a dir on the root-fs) so that you can still easily get in if something goes wrong with the mount. Of course, it would probably still work even if you dont do this, because it would just create a new homedir under the /Users mountpoint, but you would probably have to manually remove this data before you could re-mount the ZFS partition next time. The separate (e.g. /Admin) route is IMO cleaner.

^^^ This

You can use zfs set mountpoint=/Users your_zfs_pool too, and that it's what I did. ;-)

Code: Select all
ubik:~ casa$ zfs list
NAME                          USED   AVAIL   REFER  MOUNTPOINT
ZFSPool                     46,1Gi   470Gi   126Ki  /Volumes/ZFSPool
ZFSPool/Parallels           15,0Gi   470Gi  15,0Gi  /Volumes/ZFSPool/Parallels
ZFSPool/Users               30,8Gi   470Gi  28,8Gi  /Users
ZFSPool/local                199Mi   470Gi   198Mi  /Volumes/ZFSPool/local
ZFSquadra                    465Gi  1,34Ti   204Ki  /Volumes/ZFSquadra
ZFSquadra/ubik               465Gi  1,34Ti   260Ki  /Volumes/ZFSquadra/ubik
ZFSquadra/ubik/Parallels    15,0Gi  1,34Ti  15,0Gi  /Volumes/ZFSquadra/ubik/Parallels
ZFSquadra/ubik/Users        35,0Gi  1,34Ti  29,3Gi  /Volumes/ZFSquadra/ubik/Users
ZFSquadra/ubik/local         306Mi  1,34Ti   218Mi  /Volumes/ZFSquadra/ubik/local
ZFSquadra/ubik/media         385Gi  1,34Ti   385Gi  /Volumes/ZFSquadra/ubik/media
ZFSquadra/ubik/timemachine  29,5Gi  1,34Ti  29,5Gi  /Volumes/ZFSquadra/ubik/timemachine
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