Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:12:02 +0900 From: Tomoaki AOKI <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp> To: Richard Childers <childers@redwoodhodling.com> Cc: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 14.2; Thunderbird 128.6; Chromium, Iridium, etc Message-ID: <20250115181202.3a56c387836a4be82c38a65a@dec.sakura.ne.jp> In-Reply-To: <352dfe48-9a5e-4204-a854-e3cb0b3889aa@redwoodhodling.com> References: <9d21e261-e943-44df-8f84-8c2cb3ca81f8@redwoodhodling.com> <20250111132434.6d0e06c9f3b39e7a52e8f354@dec.sakura.ne.jp> <352dfe48-9a5e-4204-a854-e3cb0b3889aa@redwoodhodling.com>
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Just replying partially in place...
On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 04:37:07 +0000
Richard Childers <childers@redwoodhodling.com> wrote:
> "Is there a symlink /usr/home pointing to /home?"
>
>
> Waxing philosophic on /home ...
>
>
> Back in 1986 I was working at GE Calma supporting a lab full of diverse
> UNIX servers - Apollo, Silicon Graphics, Power/64 with six CPUs (yes, in
> 1986) and also a Sequent (another multiprocessor platform running UNIX),
> a few Sun servers and about 30 Sun workstations.
>
>
> This was the time of the Sun 2, based on the 68010. The Sun 3 (based on
> the 68020) was brand new. NFS was brand new. There were few naming
> conventions for mount points. / and /usr could be relied upon to exist
> as separate partitions. But different UNIX releases placed home
> directories in different locations.
>
>
> I opted to place home directories in their own dedicated partition on
> the hard drive because the requirements of users were different from
> those of the operating system and because I did not want the users' disk
> space requirements to interfere with the operating system's disk space
> requirements. It made disk space calculations and partition sizing
> easier if I placed home directories in their own dedicated partition. It
> made backup to tape easier. It made restoring data from tape after a
> crash easier, too. And it made NFS easier.
>
>
> I mentioned this at classes and seminars I attended and the idea caught
> on. GE Calma was literally across the freeway from Sun Microsystems'
> manufacturing facility, in Milpitas, and so they were one of Sun's very
> first customers. I had previously seen a Sun 1, at another job in San
> Francisco, but that was before Sun Microsystems had written a graphic
> user interface ('Suntools', now lost in the mists of time, not even
> Wikipedia has heard of Suntools or OpenWindows or that other GUI that
> was supposed to run Postscript but never got off the ground, lol) and at
> the time the Sun 1 was just a curiosity - "look, we ported 4.1 BSD to
> the 68000, is that cool or what?".
>
>
> GE Calma was playing with X v10.4, at the time, if you wonder - Calma
> built giant computer workstations that were used to design things like
> dams and hydroelectric projects and nuclear reactors and provided
> customers with the ability to do walkthroughs, but it was all in
> wireframe and Calma wanted to add texture) and I think I got a copy of X
> v11.0 from The Well, in Sausalito, where I knew someone who was willing
> to cut me a tape - those were the good old days.
>
>
> Obviously the factors are not the same and ZFS changes things but,
> still, it's funny to see /home has migrated back to /usr/home. It is a
> natural misunderstanding of the acronym 'usr', which refers not so much
> to the users of the operating system as it did to the separation between
> privileged executables located in the root filesystem which were a
> prerequisite to booting into single user mode, and those executables
> which formed part of the larger ecosystem of the operating system when
> it reached multiuser, at which time /usr was mounted and made accessible
> and the systems administrator could finally heave a big sigh of relief
> and tell everyone the computer was back up.
>
>
> In response to the situation I encountered with FreeBSD 14.2 ... I gave
> some thought to creating a link in /usr/home but that would only
> perpetuate a broken situation; links don't belong in /etc/passwd, IMHO,
> unless you are running NFS and have multiple NFS servers providing home
> directories and have to cobble together a shared namespace ... but that
> is the topic of another post.
>
>
> Also ... if I don't know the true cause of the problem, then how can I
> say that I have fixed it? Diving to the root of the problem gave me a
> greater understanding of Thunderbird, Chromium, and its derivatives. I
> try to resist the urge to go for the quick fix until I am sure it is
> also the best solution to the problem. Recreating /usr/home would just
> kick the problem down the road but I would still have to deal with it
> some day.
>
>
> After 40 years of troubleshooting, my credo is "eschew dependencies".
> Keep it simple. I guess we all have to define "simple" for ourselves. My
> assumption is the FreeBSD team had a good reason to get rid of
> /usr/home; they had come to the same conclusion I had reached a few
> decades before.
My understanding is that moving /home to /usr/home was NOT a good thing
and just reverted back to /home. But not creating a dedicated partition
for it by default (unfortunately).
And if I somehow required to install on UFS, I'll create dedicated
partition for /home as before (not just creating a directory inside
root partition). Yes, it would ease backups especially for multi user
systems without fears of hardlinks to outside of /home.
And ZFS easily allows separations per datasets, backup per datasets and
(if you need) per dataset quotas via `zfs set quota=<capacity>
<dataset>`.
Of course, separating by pool or by dataset is admin's choice.
For existing configurations thinking that home directories are
under /usr/home, symlink /usr/home pointing to /home would allow
tracking via old places, unless somehow disallowing tracking via
symlinks.
Regards.
>
>
> I'm not fanatical about it; I recall evaluating the Nokia FW-1, back
> around 1999 or 2000, at Hambrecht & Quist, LLC - the FW-1 was based on
> FreeBSD 3.x, I think, and the developers had taken the unusual step of
> mounting all filesystems but /var as read-only, so that home directories
> were, by necessity, located in /var/home. That sort of makes sense, for
> that particular application, where there is only one login, and that, an
> administrator - we assume he or she won't be downloading large files
> that interfere with the other functions of the /var filesystem.
>
>
> Carry on, comrades, FreeBSD 14.2 screams like the race car it is, and I
> am very impressed.
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> ~richard
>
>
> =====
>
> On 1/11/25 04:24, Tomoaki AOKI wrote:
> > On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 02:17:20 +0000
> > Richard Childers<childers@redwoodhodling.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear folks,
> >>
> >>
> >> I just upgraded from 13.3 to 14.2. Maybe I missed the memo; but moving
> >> home directories from /usr/home back to /home broke Thunderbird, it
> >> couldn't find my folders.
> >>
> >>
> >> (When I say 'upgrade', I mean 'install an up-to-date version of FreeBSD
> >> on a different laptop, install up-to-date applications, rsync my home
> >> directory to the new install, then make the jump'. Not freebsd-update(8).)
> >>
> >>
> >> The fix is to edit these two text files:
> >>
> >>
> >> /home/LOGIN/.thunderbird/????????.default/folderCache.json
> >>
> >> /home/LOGIN/.thunderbird/????????.default/prefs.js
> >>
> >>
> >> ... where '????????' represents 8
> >> Thunderbird-assigned-at-the-time-of-account-creation random ASCII
> >> characters that seem to represent a unique ID.
> >>
> >>
> >> If you've done this a few times your files may be quite old and contain
> >> references to accounts that you no longer use but a global
> >> search-and-replace should not damage these definitions either as if they
> >> still exist their paths will need to be updated as well, and if the
> >> folders no longer exist then you may safely engage in some housekeeping
> >> and delete those other lines.
> >>
> >>
> >> Here's hoping it helps those of us with not much hair to spare to avoid
> >> ripping out what is left, in frustration, after an upgrade.
> >>
> >>
> >> The output from 'pkg add -y thunderbird' is pretty sparse - less then
> >> ten lines. Not complaining but that might be a good place to put hints
> >> for administrators overseeing the upgrade - it's not done until the
> >> users can read and write email.
> >>
> >>
> >> 'thunderbird --help' refers to something called a "Migration Manager"
> >> but I could find no documentation on this from the command line;
> >> Thunderbird has no online UNIX manual page, alas.
> >>
> >>
> >> You may also find Chromium to be uncooperative; if it was running when
> >> you did your rsync, then you will have to remove the following file
> >> before it will start on the new machine:
> >>
> >>
> >> % rm -f .config/chromium/SingletonLock
> >>
> >>
> >> You may as well remove them all:
> >>
> >>
> >> % rm -f .config/chromium/Singleton*
> >>
> >>
> >> You might even want to do this:
> >>
> >>
> >> % rm -f .config/*/Singleton*
> >>
> >>
> >> ... that will fix Iridium and ungoogled-chromium, too.
> >>
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >>
> >> ~richard
> >>
> >>
> >> =====
> >>
> >>
> >> More info:https://www.redwoodhodling.com/Exhibits/
> >>
> >> See, also:https://www.redwoodlinux.com/RaspiLab/
> >>
> >> See, also:
> >> https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-innovative-raspberry-pi-classroom-project
> > Is there a symlink /usr/home pointing to /home?
> > If not, creating it could usually workaround the problem.
> >
> > As I disliked previous default (/usr/home), I habitally create /home as
> > a directory (mount point) and created symlink /usr/home pointing to it
> > manually on installation (not using installer, though) for
> > copatibilities.
> >
> > *I've created a dedicated partition for /home before I've switched to
> > Root on ZFS, and now creating a dedicated dataset for /home.
> > So /home is a mountpoint anyway for me.
> >
--
青木 知明 [Tomoaki AOKI] <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp>
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