On Tue, Oct 08, 2024 at 06:14:29PM +0100, Barry Scott wrote: > > On 4 Oct 2024, at 16:05, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Hi folks, > > > > I was recently doing a bunch of test reinstalls of Fedora [1], > > looking to see if it's complicated to retain the user directories > > during a reinstall. The answer is, sadly, that it's possible only with > > some manual tinkering. This is a known problem [2]. > > > > With a little bit of trickery, Anaconda will let the "home" subvolume > > be and install the system to a new "root" subvolume, so user data is > > preserved. But then after a reboot a new user will be created, because > > the old user is not hooked up into /etc/passwd. > > > > We actually have a partial solution for this: systemd-homed. > > With systemd-homed the information about the user is maintained in the > > user directory/subvolume/partition, e.g. /home/username.homedir. > > After a reinstall, ideally nothing needs to be done and the user > > account is ready to be used. > > I like the idea of being able to reinstall and keep the /home. > But I'd rather not use systemd-homed to get the feature. > I already have full-disk-encryption for security. > > What about having the necessary meta data in a per user file in /home > and read that when doing the reinstall? > > I would have /home/barry and /home/barry.metadata for example. What you describe is pretty much the proposal you were replying to, just with different paths. You'd have (unencrypted) /home/barry.homedir/ and /home/barry.homedir/.identity and systemd-homed would create /home/barry/ with a bind mount. You mention FDE, but the proposal was explicitly about homed homes without encryption at the homed level. This kind of setup is often used with FDE. Zbyszek -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
