[plug] User diskspace upgrade

[Brian Tombleson]

Hi David,

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE: I strongly recommend that you thoroughyl read man/ifno
on man(1), tar(1), mount(8), rm(1) and fstab(5)

From: "David Broadway" <djnitrous at hotmail.com>
>All users home directories are located on the main patition with the system
files.
>But I'm wanting to add in a second hdd just for the users diskspace.
>After installed the hdd (in to the computer)
>1. Is there much to setup to make sure the hdd will be mounted everytime on
bootup?

edit /etc/fstab and add a line similar to the following AFTER you read 'man
fstab' and adjust parameters accordingly:
/dev/hdb1 /home ext2 defaults    0       2

Don't activate this (reboot or umount/mount) until you've got the rest
sorted out.

>2. Whats the best why to move all the users folders/files permissions as
well on to the newly
> mount second hdd?

Hmm .. I've done this before with the /usr partition which taught me most of
the considerations that hard way (especially when you lose most of your
$PATH :-)

You want to make sure you copy the existing /home dir to a new location on
the new drive (eg, mount the new drive as /home2).  Then use tar because it
has good support for maintaining permissions and file ownership.  Assuming
/home and /home2 appropriately, use something like the following (one line,
probably wrapped by the email client):

tar -cpsSl --same-owner --atime-preserve --ignore-failed-read -f - /home/* |
(cd $BACKUP; tar -xvvpsS --same-owner --atime-preserve -f -)

At this point, you should have a copy of /home/ in /home2/ with all
appropriate permissions and ownership.  You just need to swap the mounts.

After editing /etc/fstab as per above, a reboot will mount your new drive to
/home and everything will work fine - except that you've lost all the drive
space under the original /home.  I'd recommend leaving it there initially
and check that everything works correctly.  If it does, then do the
following:
umount /home
rm -fr /home/*
mount /home

>I'm guessing I may have to mainly or every just make a script to change all
the users
> HOME DIR's to point at the new area where they will be!

Err .. generally not a good idea because a lot of programs/installers assume
/home/* for user's and program's home directories and not necessarily check
the /etc/passwd file or the $HOME references.

Hope this helps somebody (and even David).  I'd be interested if I've missed
any safety features or there's an easier way to do it?

Regards,
Brian.