frihomeclone

The system used for btrfs-snapshotted homes on classroom computers

Installation

The quick way to install frihomeclone is to run install.sh as root. More details are below.

The executables home_clone, home_clone_fix and home_clone_clean go into /usr/local/bin, the PAM script pam_script_ses_open goes into /usr/share/libpam-script and the files in share go into /usr/local/share/home_clone. Executables and the PAM script all need proper permissions to execute, while files in share can be read-only.

There should be a user asistent with the primary group asistent and home directory /home/asistent that acts as the "prototype" which is the base of all other homes. The user, group and home directory can be changed in home_clone and home_clone_fix. The location of the target user's home directory is assumed to be somewhere in /home or any directory of the form /foo/bar/home. The remote-mounted directory (perhaps through SMB or NFS) with user homes should have the same parent directory as the local home and also have the same child directory structure. E.g. if the user's local home is /home/user, then the remote home should be /remote_home/user, of it the local home is /foo/bar/home/baz/user, then the remote home should be /foo/bar/remote_home/baz/user.

Usage

On every login, pam_script_ses_open executes home_clone_clean to reset home directories from the previous session, then runs home_clone to recreate the user's home directory from the prototype home (user asistent by default). User's preferences, custom settings, VS Code extensions etc. are preserved across logins, while essentials are reset on every login to keep the system in a usable state.

Logs are saved to /var/log/home_clone.log.