Daniel D. Arrasjid wrote:
> 
> We're finalizing our user directory tree structure, and would like
> to know what other large sites are doing.   We're thinking of
> making a directory off the top called user, and then two levels of
> subdirectories based on the first two letters of the person's
> username.
> 
> For example, username 'daniel' would be in
> 
> user/d/a/daniel
> 
> Username 'mark29' would be in
> 
> user/m/a/mark29
> 
> With 60,000 users, we need a sensible way to distribute the users
> so that we don't end up with very large directories.  Yet we need
> to balance that with ease of navigation for our users.
> 
> Would anyone share how they manage the user space?
> 
>              Daniel

When I was still at IBM Austin, we did the following:

- A single layer of indirection with users uniformly distributed.  We
used something like /afs/austin/u3/cc  or  /:/users/u3/cc.  In the dfs
case we actually picked exactly how many entries per directory we
wanted, took the total number of users and divided.  (We had u0 through
u40 if I remember correctly).    We decided that it was better to have a
uniform distribution rather than the non-uniform one that results when
do things alphabetically, like you describe above.

- For convenience, we set up a separate symlink directory.   Something
like /:/home/cc (linked to /:/users/u3/cc).  I prefer this to the scheme
that you list above.

If you use a Single Sign-on environment (PAM or Integrated Login) this
is mostly a moot point, since you could just specify ~cc in any shell
worth its salt.  Obviously, we used the hashed path rather than the
symlink path in the master passwd file and/or registry.

-- 
Chris Cowan                       
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