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from the resistance-is-futile.-/home-will-be-assimilated dept.
Good News:
Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change:
With systemd 245 comes systemd-homed. Along with that, Linux admins will have to change the way they manage users and users' home directories.
[...] Prior to systemd every system and resource was managed by its own tool, which was clumsy and inefficient. Now? Controlling and managing systems on Linux is incredibly easy.
But one of the creators, Leannart Poettering, has always considered systemd to be incomplete. With the upcoming release of systemd 245, Poettering will take his system one step closer to completion. That step is by way of homed.
[...] let's take a look at the /home directory. This is a crucial directory in the Linux filesystem hierarchy, as it contains all user data and configurations. For some admins, this directory is so important, it is often placed on a separate partition or drive than the operating system. By doing this, user data is safe, even if the operating system were to implode.
However, the way /home is handled within the operating system makes migrating the /home directory not nearly as easy as it should be. Why? With the current iteration of systemd, user information (such as ID, full name, home directory, and shell) is stored in /etc/passwd and the password associated with that user is stored in /etc/shadow. The /etc/passwd file can be viewed by anyone, whereas /etc/shadow can only be viewed by those with admin or sudo privileges.
[...] Poettering has decided to make a drastic change. That change is homed. With homed, all information will be placed in a cryptographically signed JSON record for each user. That record will contain all user information such as username, group membership, and password hashes.
Each user home directory will be linked as LUKS-encrypted containers, with the encryption directly coupled to user login. Once systemd-homed detects a user has logged in, the associated home directory is decrypted. Once that user logs out, the home directory is automatically encrypted.
[...] Of course, such a major change doesn't come without its share of caveats. In the case of systemd-homed, that caveat comes by way of SSH. If a systemd-homed home directory is encrypted until a user successfully logs in, how will users be able to log in to a remote machine with SSH?
The big problem with that is the .ssh directory (where SSH stores known_hosts and authorized_keys) would be inaccessible while the user's home directory is encrypted. Of course Poettering knows of this shortcoming. To date, all of the work done with systemd-homed has been with the standard authentication process. You can be sure that Poettering will come up with a solution that takes SSH into consideration.
Older articles:
- Pack Your Bags – Systemd Is Taking You To A New Home
- Systemd-Homed Merged As A Fundamental Change To Linux Home Directories
Will systemd be considered complete once the kernel and boot loader have been absorbed into systemd?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday May 01 2020, @02:59PM (1 child)
Interesting, but I don't see the point in backing up Music/Videos separately. Personally, I just backup my home dir onto portable USB drives using rsync. The large stuff doesn't change often, so it doesn't take any time to backup unless you've changed it. Even if you use some kind of snapshotting backup program, this would still be the case.
The biggest problem I have with home dirs is that large desktop environments typically keep a lot of crap buried in some dot-directory like .config, and then when they update to a new version, something in there breaks (the new version doesn't read the old config file correctly, and madness ensues). The standard advice from the DE maintainers is to simply wipe out your entire home directory and start over....
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 01 2020, @06:04PM
Backing up video, images, and music separately made more sense when I started that system, which was when a big flash drive was 1G, and I still sometimes used CD-Rs and CD-RWs. I even tried those Iomega Zip drives. Lost everything to their infamous Click Of Death problem.
One hint that everyone else had moved on from CDs was that in newer kernels, I encountered several bugs related to their use. There was a problem with the type of optical media from kernel version 2.6.6 through 2.6.8 -- CD-Rs did not work, but CD-RWs were fine. If I was the first to discover these problems, that had to mean no one else was still using that hardware. More recently, I learned that 2.6.25 is the last version that can handle 40 wire PATA cables. Better find an 80 wire cable if you want to run a newer kernel on such old hardware.