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I've tried to find something about this in "Best Practices" documents
but haven't run across anything. In almost all places I have worked
with AIX, the root home directory has always been "/". Where I am
working now the standard seems to be to have the root directory in /
home/root or in some cases /root, but there is great resistance to
having the root home directory in "/". So I'm sure there are a lot of
opinions on the subject. What's your? Which do you prefer and why?
Is there a technical justification for your choice? Is your choice
best practice or just force of habit?

Gary

Ok, I will ask you a question and hopefully the answer will appear ..
Why do you think it is a good idea to root's home as a filesystem and
not part of the / filesystem ?? it is pretty obvious if you think
about what home directories are usually used for ..

Rgds
Mark Taylor

On Nov 9, 8:58 am, Mark Taylor <m...@talk21.com> wrote:
> Ok, I will ask you a question and hopefully the answer will appear ..
> Why do you think it is a good idea to root's home as a filesystem and
> not part of the / filesystem ?? it is pretty obvious if you think
> about what home directories are usually used for ..
>
> Rgds
> Mark Taylor

I'm not making any kind of statement as to what is a good or is not a
good idea. I'm trying to determine what truly is the best practice
for the location of the root home directory and why or if it really
matters. I don't use the root userid like I would use other userids
so having a home directory designed for that purpose doesn't seem to
have much relevance.

Gary

ankhu.igs@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm not making any kind of statement as to what is a good or is not a
> good idea. I'm trying to determine what truly is the best practice
> for the location of the root home directory and why or if it really
> matters. I don't use the root userid like I would use other userids
> so having a home directory designed for that purpose doesn't seem to
> have much relevance.

But keep in mind that even if YOU don't use root explicitly
there are things like cron which use it implicitly. And if
a root owned cron job is failing and creating core files you
can get root's home full. And if / gets full lots of things
start to go wrong.

I prefer root's home be /root or /home/root.

Paul Landay

On Nov 9, 9:43 am, Paul Landay <lan...@attglobal.net> wrote:
> ankhu....@gmail.com wrote:
> > I'm not making any kind of statement as to what is a good or is not a
> > good idea. I'm trying to determine what truly is the best practice
> > for the location of the root home directory and why or if it really
> > matters. I don't use the root userid like I would use other userids
> > so having a home directory designed for that purpose doesn't seem to
> > have much relevance.
>
> But keep in mind that even if YOU don't use root explicitly
> there are things like cron which use it implicitly. And if
> a root owned cron job is failing and creating core files you
> can get root's home full. And if / gets full lots of things
> start to go wrong.
>
> I prefer root's home be /root or /home/root.
>
> Paul Landay


This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I'm not trying to say is
should be in /. Your point here is reason enough to put it elsewhere.
Personally, I would prefer /root rather than /home/root just to keep
it separate from other users. No real technical reason for just my
preference.

Gary

ankhu.igs@gmail.com wrote:
> On Nov 9, 9:43 am, Paul Landay <lan...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>> ankhu....@gmail.com wrote:
>>> I'm not making any kind of statement as to what is a good or is not a
>>> good idea. I'm trying to determine what truly is the best practice
>>> for the location of the root home directory and why or if it really
>>> matters. I don't use the root userid like I would use other userids
>>> so having a home directory designed for that purpose doesn't seem to
>>> have much relevance.
>> But keep in mind that even if YOU don't use root explicitly
>> there are things like cron which use it implicitly. And if
>> a root owned cron job is failing and creating core files you
>> can get root's home full. And if / gets full lots of things
>> start to go wrong.
>>
>> I prefer root's home be /root or /home/root.
>>
>> Paul Landay
>
>
> This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I'm not trying to say is
> should be in /. Your point here is reason enough to put it elsewhere.
> Personally, I would prefer /root rather than /home/root just to keep
> it separate from other users. No real technical reason for just my
> preference.
>
> Gary
>
>

In my experience, the key is asking what happens if the system ever
needs to be brought up in single user/maintenance mode...other than
that, I'm not sure there's really a "best practice" per se. I run Linux
at home (AIX admin by trade since AIX 3.1/2 days) and since I installed
my system under "/" (didn't bother partitioning), kept Linux's default
(directory) of "/root" as root's home directory; my "regular user"
account was added to (directory) /home/myownaccount. I don't expect
this to be an issue unless the hard drive craps out or the sectors where
those respective home directories goes blooie...

Just my thoughts...others will probably have differing results/strategies.

HTH...Paul

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:00:31 +0000, Sub Genius wrote:

> ankhu.igs@gmail.com wrote:
>> [quoted text muted]
> In my experience, the key is asking what happens if the system ever needs
> to be brought up in single user/maintenance mode...other than that, I'm
> not sure there's really a "best practice" per se. I run Linux at home
> (AIX admin by trade since AIX 3.1/2 days) and since I installed my system
> under "/" (didn't bother partitioning), kept Linux's default (directory)
> of "/root" as root's home directory; my "regular user" account was added
> to (directory) /home/myownaccount. I don't expect this to be an issue
> unless the hard drive craps out or the sectors where those respective home
> directories goes blooie...
>
> Just my thoughts...others will probably have differing results/strategies.
>
> HTH...Paul


The other thing I like about getting root's ${HOME} out of / is the
problem of doing something like:

# cd ${SOME_VARIABLE_THAT_DOESNT_EXIST}
# rm -Rf *

That won't throw an error or a warning. It will just start deleting
everything it can get to...

-Chris

Christopher Petersen schrieb:

>
> The other thing I like about getting root's ${HOME} out of / is the
> problem of doing something like:
>
> # cd ${SOME_VARIABLE_THAT_DOESNT_EXIST}
> # rm -Rf *
>

Running under root I usually am a bit paranoid.
Before issuing "rm" (especially with wildcards involved)
I do a "pwd" and an "ls" dry run w/ the same parameters
as the "rm".
Well, mostly ...

>
> In my experience, the key is asking what happens if the system ever
> needs to be brought up in single user/maintenance mode...other than
> that, I'm not sure there's really a "best practice" per se. I run Linux
> at home (AIX admin by trade since AIX 3.1/2 days) and since I installed
> my system under "/" (didn't bother partitioning), kept Linux's default
> (directory) of "/root" as root's home directory; my "regular user"
> account was added to (directory) /home/myownaccount. I don't expect
> this to be an issue unless the hard drive craps out or the sectors where
> those respective home directories goes blooie...
>
> Just my thoughts...others will probably have differing results/strategies.
>
> HTH...Paul- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

In a previous life I had this exact same thing happen to me. An
application (that the vendor claimed must be run under root) core
dump, piled up a bunch of logs (in / being root's home directory),
then finally trashed the system. Would not reboot cleanly till I went
into maintenance mode and cleaned it up. Even if you have root's home
in /home/root, when you go into maintenenance your usually not
interested in all your FS mounting correctly - just getting in to
clean up the errors. I'm not seeing any good reason _not_ to have
root home out of /.

Steve

Leave $HOME as set. For AIX currently /.
To avoid errors like rm [-rf] * in the wrong
directory, the location of roots $HOME is not
a real help (all those who removed libc.a know).
Set as least an alias rm = '/usr/bin/rm -i' or
better define an rm function which does some
checking and if -R/-r are used or the command
is executed in a system dir or ... add at least
the -i flag, print an additional warning, etc.
For core files filling up /
mkdir /core
or see the syscorepath command.
If you don't like smit.* filling up / create symlinks
to another dir, like /var/root

I expect IBM testing is done with $HOME for root
at the default. They will not catch errors in the
tests like
- on SP2, Estart failed to start the switch
In one perl script executed on the switch primary
node was a series of command|command|... and one
commands was usr/bin/grep. Works fine if home is /
but fails if home is /root, /home/root, ... :-(
- update_all failing to update an X11 package leaving
a broken installation (fixed by reinstalling the package).
Same as on the SP, some re/post install script was looking
for usr/lpp/X11/something
- other errors?