Hi Aysiu, I think there might be a really small error in your tutorial about moving /home to a different partition, please see this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=986798
Hi Aysiu, I think there might be a really small error in your tutorial about moving /home to a different partition, please see this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=986798
I assure you it's not an error. This is how I've addressed it in the tutorial:In fact, I've found that when people use sudo to copy that they end up with all sorts of permission and ownership issues later and sometimes aren't able to log in.Note: I have tested the second command myself, and it works, but some have pointed out it might make sense to preface the commands with sudo in case one of the other users has subdirectories manually marked as unreadable to the user making the move. Since I have not tested this out and all directories and readable to all by default, I'm offering this as only an alternative in case the command as given does not work:
sudo find . -depth -print0 | sudo cpio --null --sparse -pvd /new/
In any case, I don't know why my tutorial gets so much flack, since it's really just a step-by-step new-user-friendly version of another tutorial that doesn't get any flack.
I have used these steps myself and know that they work as written. I also know some people have had problems with the steps and proposed other solutions, and I know other people have tried to follow those steps and run into other problems.
I don't think there is a perfect, works-all-the-time procedure for a separate /home partition. I've made it very clear that the way I have copied the tutorial from the original Wordpress tutorial has worked for me and that's all I know.
Last edited by aysiu; November 20th, 2008 at 04:18 PM.
Sorry. I don't mean to snap at you. I know you mean well. You're just trying to help.
I'm just a little frustrated.
I did not create the steps in the tutorial. I do not know what the best way is to approach it, and I also cannot take every single suggestion people throw at me or my tutorials would be a mess (if you don't believe me, take a look at the Ubuntu Wiki).
The best thing to do is to go to the source, and I've added a huge bold disclaimer at the top of the separate /home tutorial to that effect.
This is exactly how the tutorial was created:That's it. Someone else wrote it. It worked for me. I took the same steps and dressed them up a bit. That's it. I'm not a copy or cpio expert. I don't know all the intricacies of it. I just know it worked for me, and I wanted to make a friendlier-looking version of it.
- At one point in my Ubuntu journey I decided I wanted to create a separate /home partition.
- I did a Google search for how to do it.
- I came across a Wordpress blog entry that had the steps to do it.
- I followed those steps, and they worked for me.
- So I thought, "Hey, those steps are good. But it doesn't look very new-user-friendly in presentation. Maybe I'll rewrite that other person's tutorial with a different look."
- I used the exact same commands as the original tutorial and dressed up the form of it a little bit.
Normally, I own the tutorials I write because I have actually written them. In this case, I took someone else's tutorial and added a few screenshots, so I'm going to deflect any criticism of it, since I did not create the steps or the commands, and I have a lot of disclaimers at the top that people should read.
At least I can say for its present form "It worked for me." If I took every suggestion thrown my way and people still encountered problems every now and then, all I'd be able to say is "Someone told me that'd work, so I changed my tutorial."
No offense taken, I can certainly understand your frustration. In fact I want to apologize since I see now that I skipped over the beginning of the tutorial where you make it quite clear:
Maybe the reason you hear more feedback about your tutorials is because your tutorials are simply more popular and well-known than other help pages, so that would seem like a good thing and not a bad thing. But being in the spotlight also has its disadvantages when people like me come along and unintentionally skim over the disclaimers or other important stuff. So again, sorry I didn't read it more closely, but I just want to say thanks for providing some really helpful tutorials.If you believe there is something wrong with the steps, leave a comment on that guide. I did not create these steps. I just was able to follow them successfully myself and wanted to present them in a more new-user-friendly form.
Actually, I just added in that little bit today. But the other disclaimers were there before.
If I had more energy, I'd do extensive testing on all the suggestions I get, but I don't know how important it is for people to create separate /home partitions. It can be nice, but it's not necessary, and in many cases it's not even advisable. It's just there as a possibility.
I do appreciate you wanting to help out.
If I do get a month or so when I have nothing to do and want to delve into separate /home partitions with more depth, I'll certainly include your suggestion in my testing.
I was just reading some of the security section of psychocats today and liked the part where you made the point that not running as root won't protect you from everything.
I think the people who say Ubuntu doesn't need a firewall because it doesn't have ports open make a few erroneous assumptions...
1. Firewalls are only useful for filtering inbound connections: If you only look at a firewall as filtering inbound connections, you only see half of it's potential. What about filtering outbound connections with suspicious protocols, or to known bad IPs like the Russian Business Network?
2. All protocols use ports: There are protocols like ICMP which don't use ports. It's not only commonly used for information gathering in attacks, but it's not unreasonable to think history could repeat itself and there could be a vulnerability in the way it's handled by the OS.
3. Firewalls are only for preventing attacks: While they are no doubt preventative controls, by analyzing the logs they generate they can detect both failed and successful attacks. If you look at firewall logs from inbound traffic you can detect attacks and take actions. If you look at firewall logs from outbound traffic like outbound IRC or SMTP traffic to China was blocked, you could have detected a successful attack.
4. At no point will there ever be an open port: There is a chance that at some point someone could open a port. Whether it was from the administrator making a mistake in installing/configuring software, or it could be an attacker purposefully using your computer as a server to store and distribute contraband, or perhaps using your computer to host a phishing site.
I think there two of those points were brought up in the guide, so kudos for that.
I think there are some mispelled words in here:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindowsfstabI live in the United Stares, so that's my locale, but you should inputt he appropriate locale for your country of residence.
Hi Aysiu, thanks for your tutorials. This is regarding the one regarding creating a home partition. I had a lot of headaches. I got creative and backed my old home to another drive, which probably mixed something up along the way and caused my travails. I booted from a disk and cleaned things up but still got the $HOME/.dmrc file and .ICEauthority file errors and a message "Your home directory is listed as:'/home/xxx' but it does not appear to exist..."
My problem was permissions but there was a lot more to do than what was in "What if it doesn't work" section. I found this post and followed it and now everything works.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=524986
I might have had a weird screwup, so I do not know if you would want to refer to this in your tutorial, but I share it here in case it might help someone down the line. Caljohnsmith I appreciated your input too.
My absolute compliments on your pages; they cleared up a lot of issues that weren't clear to me, and I'll refer to them a lot in the future, I'm sure.
There's one thing though in the bit about Audacity that isn't working.
The Add/Remove can't find liblame0 nor libmp3lame.so.0
When trying to convert wav to mp3 Audacity itself did open a window saying I need that liblame-thing and had a "download it here" box, but that didn't do anything either.
Is this something that's outdated maybe?
edit: via Synaptic the download did work; all's working
Last edited by lazylew; December 1st, 2008 at 11:00 PM. Reason: solved
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