Hands up if your home directory is full of crap. Mine is. It has junk going back to 1999. As a measure of just how much junk I have let me tell you that at time of writing my home directory is 20Gb in size. In addition to having eleven years’ worth of files that I never got round to deleting, a large chunk of that disk usage comes from my Mac in the form of the Library subdirectory which contains pretty much everything Macs need in a user account as well as my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. Needless to say these are huge.

In fact my home directory is only as small as it is because I moved a wodge of files to a separate storage area. The Documents directory, in which my Mac wants to save … pretty much anything … is actually a symlink to /files/iain/Documents which is automounted from somewhere else. And since my documents are the kind of things which I like to have available all over the place, that same directory is also shared by Samba and my Windows roaming profile knows to go there when I try to open (My) Documents. Some other directories are similarly shared across operating systems, including Desktop, Pictures and Movies.

I’d been thinking for a while that it might be better to move these well-known file stores into their own separate ZFS filesystems on my fileserver. Things came to a head this very evening when I downloaded Steam for Mac only to have it refuse to install because Library/Application Support/Steam wasn’t on a case-insensitive filesystem. It occurred to me that if Library were its own filesystem as I’d been considering, I could make it case-insensitive and trim the size of my home directory by a considerable margin. Although I wouldn’t advocate actually doing it in so crude a way, I believe that a home directory should be small enough that if you were given a UNIX account on a new system you should be able to get yourself up to speed by quickly transferring your entire home area from another environment. A home directory should be for dotfiles, SSH keys and the like. Everything else (real documents) should go Somewhere Else.

Since I use the automounter for everything I figured this would be pretty simple. As it turns out it actually is. The syntax works with Mac, Solaris and Linux as is documented to a greater or lesser extent in each system’s AutoFS manpages. The only potential stumbling block was getting it to work with LDAP but ended up being just as simple as you might hope.

The syntax to have the automounter mount a subdirectory of a configured mount is as follows, in auto.home for instance:

    * / files:/export/home/& /Library files:/export/library/&

So for all x /home/x will be mounted from fileserver:/export/home/x and /home/x/Library will be mounted from fileserver:/export/library/x.

On Linux I found I didn’t need the initial / by itself but both Mac and Solaris didn’t work without it. Another gotcha was that the Library directory had to actually exist in the original directory for it to be mounted from the specified location. In other words it wasn’t sufficient to export /export/home/iain and /export/library/iain from my file server. I also needed to create /export/home/iain/Library for it to be mounted.

In LDAP speak my auto.home became:

    dn: cn=/,ou=auto.home,ou=mounts,dc=iain,dc=cx
    objectClass: automount
    cn: /
    automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rw,intr / files:/export/home/&
     /Library files:/export/library/&

To automount more subdirectories it suffices to add more bits to the automount entry.

    dn: cn=/,ou=auto.home,ou=mounts,dc=iain,dc=cx
    objectClass: automount
    cn: /
    automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rw,intr / files:/export/home/&
     /Library files:/export/library/& /Documents files:/export/documents/&

And by redirecting my Windows shell folders to point to these filesystems in their CIFS form I can share them between operating systems.

Looks like I managed to kill my blog for a while. I’m not entirely sure how it happened; probably something to do with the fact that my WordPress installation is stored in a GIt submodule underneath my main web tree. Somehow I ended up blowing it away. That happened yesterday and unfortunately I didn’t notice until today. Luckily with Git managing the files on disk, the files being backed up daily and Git being backed up too, I was spoilt for choice regarding the method of repairing the damage.