People have argued this back and forth on different merits. Not one of them has been how us "old UNIX weenies" have often addressed it for decades. So might I interject** ... ;-> - TLD /home isn't always the most ideal ... consider a subdirectory First off, many of us just leave the top-level directory (TLD) /home on the / (root) filesystem. But then we create and mount a "local data" filesystem under /home -- maybe the systemname -- e.g., /home/mypc. If the system is really dedicated to a select user, or group of users (e.g., multiple X terminals to one host), then it could be their names. Why might we do this? - Never assume a "data" is "local data" ... especially with 2+ systems Because, secondly, we may be mounting other filesystems via NFS or AFS from other systems. This is why we create and mount a "local data" filesystem under a subdirectory of /home, and not /home itself -- because it might be a "peer" to network-mounted directories. From the standpoint of the software -- /home/pcA, /home/pcB or /home/pcC could be the local PC, or it could be a remote NFS mount -- the software doesn't care. Which brings me to the next concept ... - With 2+ systems, consider taking 10 minutes to learn the automounter Third, in reality, we usually do _not_ like to create and mount filesystems that might be "shared" aka "exported" on /home. In fact, we like to use /home as a "concentration point" for either mounts, or symlinks to mounts -- or as a main "automounter" root. As such, on most systems, we create "local data" filesystems under a new TLD, /export, and then automount all filesystems (even the local) under /home. E.g., on a network with a server and 3 PCs, I might have the following filesystems ... server1:/export/accounting server1:/export/engineering server1:... pcA:/export/pcA pcA:/export/pcB pcB:/export/pcC On a SOHO network (<6 nodes), I'll just directly create the automounter maps on each system. On a larger network, I'll then use either NIS or LDAP to publish automounter maps, so they are all automounted under /home on _all_ systems whenever they are accessed. [ Technical note: We typically want to avoid cross-mounts on the server, long story, so I might put server exports and pc exports in different automounter maps. And on the server, I wouldn't use the pc export automounter map. ] - Back on point: What should he do? Take a note from all this ... Now in this case, we doesn't need to be concerned with /export and NFS or automounting. But if _anyone_ is going to suggest a "best practice," I think it should start with the idea that you _might_ have more than 1 "data" filesystem at some point (regardless of systems, networking, etc...). *SO* might I suggest the new system have a filesystem called: /home/pcname And just mount this new, "local data" directory in /home/pcname under /home, where /home is just a subdirectory of the / (root) filesystem. If you're thinking ahead, are putting your user data under it, but don't want to label it system-specific, then consider using a domain name, subdomain name (e.g., location or department) or something else. E.g., I have more than one location with a server, so I use /home/oviedo (Oviedo, FL USA) on my main, home server. I also have a media server which is mounted as /home/static (static content). My home directory is /home/oviedo/bjsmith. My systems don't know if that's local or remote -- and they don't care. They just know it's /home/oviedo/bjsmith. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, technical annoyance mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------------------- Illegal Immigration = "Representation Without Taxation" -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com