Need to split /home

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2004, Michael Hipp wrote:
>I have one production server where /home has outgrown its disk. It is 
>using all of hdc as a single ext3 partition.
>
>Is there some clever way to split a directory like /home across 2 disks 
>(partitions)?
>
>In lieu of a better plan I may end up just using symlinks for the 
>directories inside /home that I move to the second disk. But this seems 
>like a crude way to do it and doomed to be somewhat of a maintenance 
>problem.

One way to handle this is to use the amd automounter to manage a /homes
directory, making symlinks such as ``ln -s /homes/user /home/user''.  This
allows keeping some directories under /home while putting most of the in
other directories or even on other systems.  One could also edit the
/etc/passwd file to point user's home directories to /homes instead of
/home eliminating one symlink.  This is similar to methods that have been
used on Sun systems for years, and is documented in the amd system.

A major advantage of doing it this way is that the amd configuration files
can specify conditional path names so that a home directory on one system
may be a symlink to a real mounted file system while on another it would be
an NFS mount.  With a bit of care, the same amd configuration file can be
used on all systems on a network, or can be supplied using LDAP.

I have worked on systems that limited the number of directories in a single
directory (e.g. SCO OpenServer allows(ed) only 999 which caused immediate
problems at even small ISPs).

Bill
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