[SOLVED] Need help with moving /home in Fedora 12

[blnl]

In openSUSE I have developed a practice to install the system with /home on the root partition and then later make the link to my real /home, which is on the separate partition.

init 1
mv /home /home.old
mkdir /home      
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda4 /home
init 5

Of course, I edit /etc/fstab to include new home location

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST96812A_5PJ14Q1M-part4  /home       ext4     acl,user_xattr 1 2

Recently I migrated to Fedora 12. There I perform the same operations to link my /home partition. It works fine, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the result.

The problem is that gnome_terminal does not start in /home/<user>, but it brings me to / instead. I must always type "cd" to get to my working directory (as shown below).

[boris@nc6000 /]$ pwd
/
[boris@nc6000 /]$ cd
[boris@nc6000 ~]$ pwd
/home/boris
[boris@nc6000 ~]$

I checked environment variable $HOME, it points to the working directory:

[boris@nc6000 /]$ echo $HOME
/home/boris

What else can be wrong?

Please help me, I have to fix this, it is simply too annoying to be ignored.

[scathefire]

anything in any of your logs? messages, secure, anything like that? maybe its selinux?

sestatus

is it enforcing? now check the file permissions of your home directory

ls -Z /home
ls -Z /old.home

are they different? try turning off selinux.

setenforce permissive

or you could see if selinux is even the problem by logging alerts, check under /var/log/audit.

I, in general, turn SELinux off. Too many things to configure, but this might be of some use to you if you do want to keep it on. HowTos/SELinux - CentOS Wiki

Then again, selinux may not be your problem. Just have to wait and see.

[blnl]

SELinux status is indeed enforcing

[boris@nc6000 ~]$ sestatus
SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /selinux
Current mode:                   enforcing
Mode from config file:          enforcing
Policy version:                 24
Policy from config file:        targeted
[boris@nc6000 ~]$

I see nothing strange with the file permissions of my home directory.

[boris@nc6000 ~]$ ls -Z /home
drwx------. boris users unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0 boris
drwx------. root  root  system_u:object_r:file_t:s0      lost+found
[boris@nc6000 ~]$ ls -Z /home.old
drwx------. boris users unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0 boris
[boris@nc6000 ~]$

But I do see a difference at / level

[boris@nc6000 ~]$ ls -Z /
dr-xr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:bin_t:s0       bin
dr-xr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:boot_t:s0      boot
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:device_t:s0    dev
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:etc_t:s0       etc
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:file_t:s0      home
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:home_root_t:s0 home.old
dr-xr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:lib_t:s0       lib
drwx------. root root system_u:object_r:lost_found_t:s0 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:mnt_t:s0       media
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:mnt_t:s0       mnt
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0       opt
dr-xr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:proc_t:s0      proc
dr-xr-x---. root root system_u:object_r:admin_home_t:s0 root
dr-xr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:bin_t:s0       sbin
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:security_t:s0  selinux
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:var_t:s0       srv
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:sysfs_t:s0     sys
drwxrwxrwt. root root system_u:object_r:tmp_t:s0       tmp
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0       usr
drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:var_t:s0       var
[boris@nc6000 ~]$

So I changed the /home attributes as follows:

[root@nc6000 /]# chcon -v --type=home_root_t home
changing security context of `home'
[boris@nc6000 ~]$

Initially nothing happened, gnome-terminal still started in /.
But after rebooting my computer, gnome-terminal starts in /home/boris .

scathefire: thanks a lot for helping me!

[whych]

When you moved /home to /home.old and then made a new folder called home on the root partition were you logged in as a user or as root?
If you were logged in as boris, boris and then run the commands as su, boris still needs his home directory.
Log in as root and then mount the new partition as /home in the fstab. Don't worry about creating /home first since you are creating it in the fstab.
Make sure that boris is still the owner of the new /home/boris.
This works for me in suse and it should work in any other distro.

[blnl]

whych: thanks for the explanation.

I was indeed logged in as boris, and than used su to get the root privileges. However, as these operations were performed in 1st run level (init 1), I assumed that /home/boris is not used any more.