> I want to keep my home directory on an external drive and move it between > computers as required.
First, make sure that your users on the different computers have the same uid/gid (edit /etc/passwd and /etc/group for that). > > 1. It is asking for super-user privileges to mount it. How can I avoid > this? Use the 'users' mount options, but mounting/unmounting your own home when you're logged is probably not a good idea. > > 2. Should I place "/home/masatran", or "/home", on the drive? This is your choice here. With /home, you'll have the homes of all your users on your drive (except if some have their home elsewhere, of course). You probably want the other choice. > > 3. How can I get it to use the external drive as my home directory during > login, for the application data, etc.? > > 4. I read somewhere that the external drive must be named for the links to > remain permanent. Is this correct? How do I name it? Not sure I understood those two points, but you should give a label to your drive (if it's an ext3 filesystem, do 'e2label /dev/xxx NAME') and use an fstab entry like this: LABEL=NAME /home/masatran ext3 defaults It will then be mounted automatically at boot time. -- Cédric Lucantis