[svlug] RHL 5.2

[Rafael Skodlar]

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Walter Reed wrote:

> At 07:29 PM 11/14/98 , Javilk wrote:
> >The Infamous Rick Moen wrote:
> >> Nothing in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard even remotely suggests 
> >> putting the system HTML tree under /home (or even mentions that tree,
> >> for that matter.)  The notion that it's the httpd "user's" home directory 
> >> is pretty ridiculous.  (Does that "user" get a public_html subtree and
> >> mail spool, too?)
> >
> >     As a professional webmaster, I would say that /home is a good place
> >for it, as it is something you want to preserve between installations, and
> >maintain frequent backups of; while /usr, if not complete with /usr/local
> >on a separate drive, is wiped clean during installs. (Though not
> >upgrades.)  Given that, one might argue that /home/httpd/conf is a good
> >place for the configuration files, though.  Yet these are more subject to
> >attack than /etc, since /etc might more likely be on a write protected
> >drive.   Since my /home directory is a different drive from the /etc
> >directory, I back up the /etc/httpd/conf directory to the /home/httd/conf
> >directory.
> 
> As someone who also hosts quite a few sites, I would Never use /home for 
> web docs. I always setup a dedicated partition for Apache outside the
> standard directory tree. 

Strongly agree. Users can make links to the location where html tree is. 
Either they have access/permissions to the whole tree or a section of it.

> 
> /home is for real login users only on my system, and Apache is NOT a 
> login user, it's a "system" user. You wouldn't have /home directories 
> for the "mail", "lp", "news" users would you? Since Apache's log files 
> can grow Very large, Very fast, I tend to keep them away from the 
> standard places too.

To make things worse, examples in magazines like Linux Journal suggest to
put smtpd in /home! On top of that the guy puts spool and etc under the
same tree. Ohh, man!  Old DOS days are back. People will create all kind
of crapy trees just to be different. How soon we'll see /ProgramFiles and
Mydocuments? 

When I say backup /home I mean just that. No other crap should be there.
It's either /home or /export/home if the machine is the server.

> 
> Also, since RedHat puts crap in /home the argument of leaving /home alone
> during install / upgrades fails.
> 
Yes, leave /home alone. /var should have all spool stuff (printer, mail,
news, ...) If you need more space then you just plug in additional
drive/partition in the tree. Same goes for /usr/local. Don't mess with the
root is my rule! Otherwise it's a hell to upgrade the system and preserve
other old files.

> Until most / all the major packages support FHS, the problem of OS vendors
> doing strange things won't go away. The FHS people probably need to 
> petition the major package managers to include support maybe by adding
> a (default?) configuration option (--install-layout=FHS). Getting support for 
> all the standard GNU stuff, sendmail, qmail, bind, apache, etc. is what FHS
> needs to be useful.
> 
> Until that happens, people (like me) who like to keep current are going to 
> have a hell of a time with package management. That's the real issue here.
> 
> So on one side, Red Hat is doing (mostly) the "right thing" by supporting
> FHS, and on the other, I can't update and easily maintain that structure
> because the package doesn't nativly support FHS.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Walter Reed
> Engineering Director
> InterTrade Systems Corp.
> 

   Rafael





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