How to change the default home directory?

Asked Aug 04 '17 at 17:50

Active Aug 06 '17 at 20:18

Viewed 2,054 times

On a server, I have mounted a big drive on /home2 in order to store all the user accounts.

Supposedly in order to set the default directory to /home2, we are supposed to edit /etc/default/useradd

Inside is a line (commented out)

#HOME=/home

which I change to:

HOME=/home2

Yet subsequently, useradd -m continues to create users home directories in /home. For the moment, I just mounted the new drive as /home, and that did work obviously.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong?

edited Aug 06 '17 at 20:18

Zanna

70,465

asked Aug 04 '17 at 17:50

Dov

2

Possible duplicate of Move home folder to second drive – mikewhatever Aug 04 '17 at 17:54
Did you uncomment the line in the /etc/default/useradd when you made the change to it? – Terrance Aug 04 '17 at 17:55
Show us a diff /etc/default/useradd useradd.backup. You did keep a backup of the only working copy you know of, right? – waltinator Aug 04 '17 at 19:48
nope. It's a brand new system, no one is on it, and it never occurred to me. And it's one line. I will have to do this Tuesday, I can't reach it now. – Dov Aug 05 '17 at 02:02
yes, I did uncomment the line #HOME=/home becomes HOME=/home2 – Dov Aug 05 '17 at 13:13
adduser seems to ignore the useradd setting. useradd uses the location specified in the configuration file but adduser simply ignores it – Felix B. Mar 11 '21 at 17:22

How to change the default home directory?

0 Answers0