Isilon: How to move the admin home directory

Summary: Isilon: How to move the admin home directory

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Instructions

Introduction

There are some security implications to keeping admin home directories under /ifs. The following procedure moves it out of the cluster coherent /ifs/home/admin and makes it nodes specific in /admin.

Procedure

Verify directory space

  1. Open an SSH connection on any node in the cluster and log in using the "root" account.
  2. Run the following commands to verify that each node has space to fit the contents of the /ifs/home/admin directory:

    du -sh /ifs/home/admin
    isi_for_array df -h /

Output similar to the following should display:

root@OneFS-1 ~ # du -sh /ifs/home/admin
28K    /ifs/home/admin

root@OneFS-1 ~ # isi_for_array df -h /
OneFS-3: Filesystem          Size  Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
OneFS-3: /dev/mirror/root0 1.9G 740M 1.0G 42% /
OneFS-2: Filesystem          Size  Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
OneFS-2: /dev/mirror/root0 1.9G 847M 912M 48% /
OneFS-1: Filesystem          Size  Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
OneFS-1: /dev/mirror/root0 1.9G 1.1G 641M 64% /

Note: Ensure each node has an Avail size greater than that listed from the du command. 

Create local home directories and copy contents

  1. Create the new empty admin home directory:

    isi_for_array 'mkdir /admin'

 

  • Duplicate the existing admin home directory:

    isi_for_array cp -rp /ifs/home/admin/ /admin

 

  • Assign ownership and permissions:

    isi_for_array  chown admin /admin; chmod 700 /admin

 

Verify contents of the directory

isi_for_array 'diff /ifs/home/admin /admin && echo directories match || echo directories do not match'
 
Output similar to the following should display:

OneFS-2: directories match
OneFS-1: directories match
OneFS-3: directories match

Modify the user

isi auth users modify admin --home-directory=/admin

Remove the old directory

rm -rf /ifs/home/admin

Affected Products

Isilon

Products

Isilon, PowerScale OneFS
Article Properties
Article Number: 000158102
Article Type: How To
Last Modified: 18 Sept 2025
Version:  5
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