side effects of having user home directories [ at all | on system drive | on data drive ]

Hi!

I'm in the process of setting up my new omv6 home server and need some feedback.

In my history of using omv I never had set up home directories for my users (= most of them family members of mine).

This lead to some inconveniences here and there e.g. no bash histories, when logged in via ssh.

Nevertheless aside from some general shares every user had one ore more personal samba shares with exclusive access.

So when I wanted to (re-)create my first user now, I thought about enabling user shares for the first time.

I have no idea at this point if the home dirs will end up getting used aside from .bash_histories at all. But now I had the chance to give every user a home without tinkering.

Are there any side effects (or downsides) of having home dirs when accessing shares via samba/ssh?

And the other question: As I have a large and fast system ssd for the first time, sharerootfs is installed for other reasons and most large user data will go to the general shares anyway, I think of adding the existing /home on the root filesystem as shared folder for the user home directories.

Is this a bad mistake or no problem at all? There used to be an omv paradigm of never using the system drive for data but that seems to have been eroded more and more.

I also plan to use the large system ssd for docker and kvm for two reasons. It is by far the fastest drive and I want my data drives to go to sleep when not needed.

Does putting homes on system or data drives set my docker/kvm plans to any trouble?

I hope, my thoughts are not too confusing.

Would love to get any suggestions and field reports from all of you.

Thanks for your replies.

My system ssd is 500gb now and as my plans go, omv system, docker and (small) virtual machines will take a fraction of that. So I'm not afraid of them filling my disk. I know the flashmemory plugin and had it in use but decided to go with an ssd this time, as I can only boot from SATA or USB2 ports. And putting the system on a fast ssd with wear leveling, which otherwise would be mostly empty gives me more peace of mind than another flimsy usb2 connected thumbdrive sticking around.

I now decided to put the home dirs onto my data drives and hope, that there are no sporadic write or read accesses, when no one is logged in. Don't want my data drives being awake 24/07.

I also thought about my backup strategy. In my thinking, VMs and dockers are logical more part of the operationg system and its services than being data. More than one of my planned containers has previously been an official omv plugin. So my plan is, to have my whole system disk incl. docker and kvm backupped on a regular basis. Yes, it is occupying more space than just omv without the container stuff, but what are even ~100GB in times, where single spinning disks take up to 20.000GB?

Thanks again for your thoughts on these subjects!