Hello.
Sorry for the noob question, but googling has not given clear answer for this question.
If I have 2 HDDs so during installation of Debian can I create several /home volumes: one on each HDD (I mean without creating RAID volume) and how will it be shown in Debian: several /home partitions mounted like HOME1, HOME2, etc or something else?
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Several /home volumes on different disks.
Re: Several /home volumes on different disks.
Either your question isn't entirely clear, or I've not yet consumed sufficient coffee, so I'm going to answer the question I think you've asked, and hope for the best.
Yes, you can have different users' /home directories on separate physical volumes, but you cannot have multiple /home directories for a single user.
The trick behind having /home directories on different volumes involves some magic called a symbolic link (symlink for short). A symlink merely creates an association that allows one thing to be referenced by different names, sort of like when someone says, "Hi, My name is Zezazuzahbel, but you can call me Skip"
Let's work through a quick example where we symlink up a couple of /home directories for two users, Alice and Bob. I want to stress this is only an example, intended to teach you just enough for you to be able to understand what you're reading when I point you to Google/Startpage/DuckDuckGo/Bing/whatever. It is not a "step-by-step, do it exactly this way."
For this example, imagine that we have two disks, sda and sdb. For simplicity's sake, we'll imagine that each disk is formatted into a single volume, so our two physical volumes will be sda1 and sdb1. We will arbitrarily choose to have sda1 as the mount point for our root filesystem. Since the actual directory called /home has to live somewhere, so we'll also arbitrarily put it on sda1, as well.
For simplicity's sake, we'll imagine making a directory called Alice on sda1, and a directory called Bob on sdb2.
Having /Alice and /Bob appear as /home/Alice and /home/Bob is a matter of symlinking the actual location (say, /Alice) with the symbolic location (/home/Alice).
It's no harder than that.
As I hinted above, there's tons of reading material on symlinks on the InterWebz, and now that you know what to search for, go forth and learn. Post back if you have specific questions.
Yes, you can have different users' /home directories on separate physical volumes, but you cannot have multiple /home directories for a single user.
The trick behind having /home directories on different volumes involves some magic called a symbolic link (symlink for short). A symlink merely creates an association that allows one thing to be referenced by different names, sort of like when someone says, "Hi, My name is Zezazuzahbel, but you can call me Skip"
Let's work through a quick example where we symlink up a couple of /home directories for two users, Alice and Bob. I want to stress this is only an example, intended to teach you just enough for you to be able to understand what you're reading when I point you to Google/Startpage/DuckDuckGo/Bing/whatever. It is not a "step-by-step, do it exactly this way."
For this example, imagine that we have two disks, sda and sdb. For simplicity's sake, we'll imagine that each disk is formatted into a single volume, so our two physical volumes will be sda1 and sdb1. We will arbitrarily choose to have sda1 as the mount point for our root filesystem. Since the actual directory called /home has to live somewhere, so we'll also arbitrarily put it on sda1, as well.
For simplicity's sake, we'll imagine making a directory called Alice on sda1, and a directory called Bob on sdb2.
Having /Alice and /Bob appear as /home/Alice and /home/Bob is a matter of symlinking the actual location (say, /Alice) with the symbolic location (/home/Alice).
It's no harder than that.
As I hinted above, there's tons of reading material on symlinks on the InterWebz, and now that you know what to search for, go forth and learn. Post back if you have specific questions.
Re: Several /home volumes on different disks.
If you want to have the space of both disks available in your home partition without symlinks this is possible with LVM.
But not in the way you image (you are thinking too much along the lines of windows drive letters)
With LVM (Logical Volume Manager) the physical disks no longer matter after configuration.
The steps are easy, the commands slightly harder, but you can use a graphical partitioning program.
- Create the physical volumes on the disk and tag them as being lvm (fdisk or gparted and set type to 8e/LVM) (in this example /dev/sda6 and /dev/sdb1)
- Now tell LVM to configure these created volumes as PV's (pvcreate /dev/sdb1; /pvcreate/sda6)
- Create a Volume group (vgcreate VGSYSTEM)
- Create a logical volume (lvcreate -n lvHOME VGSYSTEM)
- Create a filesystem on this LV (mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/VGSYSTEM-lvHOME)
- Mount the LV in /home (mount /dev/mapper/VGSYSTEM-lvHOME /home)
- add the LV to /etc/fstab
Of course, it would be much easier to set up LVM at the moment you install Debian
But not in the way you image (you are thinking too much along the lines of windows drive letters)
With LVM (Logical Volume Manager) the physical disks no longer matter after configuration.
The steps are easy, the commands slightly harder, but you can use a graphical partitioning program.
- Create the physical volumes on the disk and tag them as being lvm (fdisk or gparted and set type to 8e/LVM) (in this example /dev/sda6 and /dev/sdb1)
- Now tell LVM to configure these created volumes as PV's (pvcreate /dev/sdb1; /pvcreate/sda6)
- Create a Volume group (vgcreate VGSYSTEM)
- Create a logical volume (lvcreate -n lvHOME VGSYSTEM)
- Create a filesystem on this LV (mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/VGSYSTEM-lvHOME)
- Mount the LV in /home (mount /dev/mapper/VGSYSTEM-lvHOME /home)
- add the LV to /etc/fstab
Of course, it would be much easier to set up LVM at the moment you install Debian
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