Not always, no.
Some login methods require files in $HOME. sshd with authorized_keys is only one of them. Not every system has a console, and even if it has one I don't want to force somebody to go to the data center and plug something magic into some blade system just because a reboot has managed not to mount $HOME.
(Which might as well be on NFS. To require a working NFS for root login is stupid.)
Posted Mar 1, 2012 12:56 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Well, in this case /root might be necessary. But it still strikes me as an extra top-level directory which is hardly ever needed now.
Maybe it could be a job for union mounts (once Valerie Aurora gets them mainlined).
Various notes on /usr unification
Posted Mar 3, 2012 17:00 UTC (Sat) by dpquigl (subscriber, #52852)
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Has there been any progress on union mounts in the last year? Last I saw the conversation ended with the proposal dead in the water. I don't believe they ever determined who's responsibility it was to do culling of duplicate entries (the kernel, or glibc). Also the FUSE guy chimed in and claimed all the work was unnecessary and he could just do it in fuse.
Various notes on /usr unification
Posted Mar 3, 2012 22:07 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
FUSE union mounts actually work, but way too slow for real use.
And no, I'm not aware of any progress in that area.
Various notes on /usr unification
Posted Mar 4, 2012 18:02 UTC (Sun) by dpquigl (subscriber, #52852)
[Link]
If you want to go with file system approaches unionfs and aufs have been around long before the FUSE version of unionfs. How full featured is the FUSE one? From what I understand everyone has been focusing on the most common case which is one RW branch and one RO branch. They don't want to do an arbitrary number of branches.
Various notes on /usr unification
Posted Mar 4, 2012 22:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
As I understand, unionfs in FUSE is pretty complete.
However, FUSE itself is not ready at all for high-performance filesystems. It's fine for things like sshfs over WAN but totally sucks for local filesystems.