Solved small issue /usr/home <> /home

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I just observed a small issue within standard FreeBSD 13 installation:
When chosing Auto (ZFS) by standard default a /usr/home is generated.
Either the installer as bsdconfig has /home as default.

This ain't no big deal.
But it may not be so totally clean, especially for FreeBSD/unixlike newcomers,
because if it's eluded, you slip it, make no changes just stick with all as default, you may end up wondering:
"Huh? Where is the user I just generated?" - there is none.
Because since it's generated there is no /home to place user-directories in - or you have to tell the installer/bsdconfig to use /usr/home.

I just wanted to point it out, and it may be interesting to eventually re-check the default-config-settings for the installation images.
 
As far as I remember it is some kind of compromise between old and new habbits. In the past /usr/home has been the standard. Nowadays people use /home if I am not wrong. I stick without /home and without the link. It can be indeed confusing for newcomers. I guess many users accept the current behaviour without thinking about it.
 
Nope.
On my old 12.3 machine there is this link, right.
But I just did a complete new fresh installation of 13 on my laptop:
no link, no /home and - I observed it while doing it - after installer/bsdconfig with default settings also no /home, no link, no user.

That's the reason I opened this thread.
 
Interesting. I've got 2 systems that were 13.0-RELEASE installed when it came out (so -p0) and both have the symlink of /home pointing to /usr/home. I honestly can't recall when it didn't have the symlink.

Also when using ZFS, by default the installer creates a dataset for /usr/home.
 
Yes. It does.
But the default home-dir for users in the installer and bsdconfig are set to /home.
I didn't changed ynthing, just to check it out, no change in the default settings by me in the installer/bsdconfig, I generated no /home and no link, and so ended up with no /home, no link, no user.
 
chrbr said:
… old and new …
Click to expand...

<https://forums.freebsd.org/profile-posts/3723/> – the 2016 article in its entirety, and so on.

Alexander88207 said:
… adduser …
Click to expand...

Not the most recent stable/13, but enough for a quick demonstration – symbolic link /home removed, then recreated by adduser(8):

home directory.png 1645987815921.png
 
So - finally - I have my system up and running.

Fact is:
There is a link /home/ -> /user/home/ done by default installation.

Fact is also, I observed what I described, but I neither have no reasonable explanation what really happened.
I presume those "wild, funny, magic,...dubios..." things happened because of several reinstallations I pasted over without cleanly erased the nvme ssd.
I don't want to repeat here how SSDs (AHCI/S-ATA vs. PCIe/nvme) are internally work, but for me it seems to bee a good idea to ensure a SSD is really clean before complete systems (re)installations - at least after I did it, standard installation works on my machine without the funny stuff I described in my fromer threads here.

To clean a M.2 nvme SSD one may use nvmecontrol(8) (Some/newer Motherboards also offer a "secure erase" for SSDs in their BIOS)
What also not may reliably work is to use dd for writing zeros to the disk. Besides it take ages (>5h for my 512GB) it didn't solve the probs.

Example to clean first nvme-drive:
Code: 
# nvmecontrol sanitize -a block nvd0

Thank you all for participating and giving me input.
 
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I had a problem like this before, but after about 6 weeks of detoxification, everything became relatively clear again.
 
Ahh, one thing to remember: there is a difference between zroot/home and /usr/home. Quirks of ZFS to pay attention to, they make a difference in what's even possible :p
 
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