What is the purpose of the home directories of users? Are they actually necessary? I am currently planning to make the change from root to admin and possibly run some apps off of unique users. I am on Fangtooth 25.04.1. This is a continuously upgraded system from Core > Dragonfish > Electric Eel > Fangtooth. While planning this I realized that the home directories assigned to all of my current users are assigned to a pool that was deactivated years ago. This makes me think they are not necessary. If I don’t need to allocate space to these, then I’d rather not.
The home directories (and shell for that matter) are not required unless for some reason you’re providing the users shell access. This usually is not required or desired on a NAS. If you intend the account to access TrueNAS via SSH then you should create a home directory for the user so that SSH keys can be stored properly and strong authentication used.
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Thanks for the straightforward reply. I only use ssh for burn-in so will probably leave the home designations empty for now.
Create home directories for TrueNAS admin users but not for ordinary NAS users.
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IF they need ssh access.