User Directories

[Don Buchholz]

In article <709 at aos.brl.mil> somsky at brl.mil (William R. Somsky) writes:
>With the '/usr' partition sucking up almost the entire hard-drive on
>installation, is there really any good reason for putting users on a
>seperate '/u' partiton?  I've heard suggestions of soft-linking '/u' or
>'/u/<username>' to directories on '/usr', but can anyone think of a
>reason that I wouldn't want to just put all users DIRECTLY on the
>'/usr' partition, say, in something like '/usr/u', and modify
>'/etc/passwd' to match?  (Is it perhaps that SMIT insists on putting
>users in'/u'?)  
>
>Any comments on this matter?

If, for whatever reason, you should have to reinstall the AIX OS,
then according to page 2 of the Installation Guide, the following
directories will be erased and recreated: /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib, /info,
/tmp, and /usr.  So it might save a bit of restoration time if the 
users were actually in /u.  

I've also heard rumors (as yet unsubstantiated) that a major OS 
upgrade would thrash these same directories.  I suppose something
like a move to AIX 4.x would do it.  [At the rate IBM is sending out
upgrades that'll probably be '92 :-)].

Don Buchholz                   
Oregon Graduate Institute     
buchholz at ese3.ese.ogi.edu