/usr/home/ became /home/ ?!?

C

charlesg

Having a tough time understanding something and can't figure out what happened. This morning an nfs share stopped working on my dev environment, it was working fine yesterday. After some head scratching, I relalized that my /home/ directory isn't a symlink to /usr/home/ anymore, it is a real directory containing my home stuff. Also, /usr/home/ still exists, but it is empty. Since my nfs export was /usr/home/..., changing it to /home/... made it possible to mount it again.

My dev environment consists of 3 vagrant boxes ("freebsd/FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE") that I never provision or touch directly, I pretty much only do vagrant up every morning and off I go. At first I thought it must be a bad operation on my part, but I realized that my 3 boxes are now like this, even one where there is no nfs or anything related to the /home/ directory.

Any ideas of how this could have happened?
 
I created a fresh instance of this vagrant box (no provisioning) and it has the same directory structure where /home/ isn't a link to /usr/home/, but a regular directory.

Is it vagrant specific?
 
Did more tests and I have the same result with 11.2 and 10.3 boxes from freebsd. Also I tried 11.2 from bento and this one has the correct directory structure where /home/ is a link to /usr/home/. So I guess this is an issue with the official freebsd vagrant boxes?
 
charlesg It's not "the" official way of getting FreeBSD. Personally I'd trust only official sources as specified here. Any 3rd party provider is .. well, 3rd party.
You can always build your own vagrant image and set it up. They (3rd party) probably decided to change the settings in the image.

There's no rule that /usr/home should be in fact /usr/home. Personally I've been changing it to /home since I started using FreeBSD ( 4.7 ).

In your case I'd rather set /home to /export/home and use a local mount to /home on that box.
 
_martin said:
It's not "the" official way of getting FreeBSD.
Click to expand...
Yes, exactly why I did put "official" in quotes and I was referring to the information about those vagrant boxes, not how to get freebsd :)

_martin said:
There's no rule that /usr/home should be in fact /usr/home. Personally I've been changing it to /home since I started using FreeBSD ( 4.7 ).
Click to expand...
I see. Personally I don't really mind if it is /usr/home/ or /home/, but I do want it to be consistent, so my configs/ansible work everywhere (vagrant or vanilla freebsd).

Anyway, I don't understand the motivation behind this breaking change and I'll just use the vagrant bento box for now.

Thanks for your input!
 
Well, only they can comment on what they had in mind. :) That's why I like that /export/* mount point - it kinda gives you a hint it's an exported FS.

As a (fun) side note, do you know the history of why there is /usr? For example here: unix directory hierarchy. So while there might have been a reason why there was /usr/home before it doesn't necessarily mean there's a reason to keep it that way now. Even more so if you use ZFS.
 
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