interfect's questions

I have my home directory at /z/home/$USER, instead of at /home/$USER, so I can have it on ZFS.

This upsets Snap packages to no end. When I try and run them, they say:

Sorry, home directories outside of /home are not currently supported. See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/11209 for details.

When I go to that URL, I get a workaround, but not one described in sufficient detail to actually implement:

Snapd does currently not support running snaps if the home directory of the user is outside of /home. This is discussed here here.

A workaround is to bind mount the home directory outside /home into /home.

The linked thread degenerates into discussion of what the design for properly supporting arbitrary home directories ought to be, and it is not immediately apparent to me how to implement the described workaround. I tried bind mounting /z/home/$USER to also appear at /home/$USER, and telling the Snap that that is my home directory, but my Snap package I want to run is still insisting that my home directory is bad and refusing to run:

$ sudo mkdir /home/$USER
$ sudo chown ${USER}:${USER} /home/$USER
$ sudo mount --bind /z/home/$USER /home/$USER
$ HOME=/home/$USER any-snap-package 
Sorry, home directories outside of /home are not currently supported. 
See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/11209 for details.

How, exactly, does one go about implementing the workaround described by Michael Vogt in the linked Snapcraft forum thread? Or does the workaround not actually work?

I've installed Ubuntu Server 18.04, and instead of the old /etc/network/interfaces, it seems that my network configuration now lives in a series of YAML files in /etc/netplan, of which the only one I actually have is /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml:

# This file is generated from information provided by
# the datasource.  Changes to it will not persist across an instance.
# To disable cloud-init's network configuration capabilities, write a file
# /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-disable-network-config.cfg with the following:
# network: {config: disabled}
network:
    ethernets:
        ens3:
            addresses: []
            dhcp4: true
            dhcp6: true
            nameservers: {}
            optional: true
        ens4:
            addresses: []
            dhcp4: true
            dhcp6: true
            nameservers: {}
            optional: true
    version: 2

That seems to have been generated by cloud-init, from /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/50-curtin-networking.cfg:

network:
  ethernets:
    ens3:
      addresses: []
      dhcp4: true
      dhcp6: true
      nameservers: {}
      optional: true
    ens4:
      addresses: []
      dhcp4: true
      dhcp6: true
      nameservers: {}
      optional: true
  version: 2

What's the right way to edit this configuration and apply the changes to the running machine? The comment in the Netplan file suggested to me that it's ephemeral and generated on reboot by cloud-init, so I should edit cloud-init's config. But even after editing it and rebooting, I don't see any changes to the Netplan file, and I definitely don't know how to apply the cloud-init config changes manually. And upon reading the comment again, now it seems to me that it's talking about changes not persisting across destruction and recreation of the machine, which would seem to go without saying. So clearly I'm misunderstanding something.

So my question is:

1. Where in the new cloud-init/netplan system am I supposed to be putting manual network configuration?

2. How do I apply changes I make in /etc/netplan?

3. How do I apply changes I make in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d?

I am running Nautilus 3.4.2 on Ubuntu 12.04. I spend a lot of my time working on files and in folders accessed over SSH, which I connect to by putting sftp://wherever.my.domain/home/myuser/folder in my Nautilus URL bar, and bookmarking the folder with Ctrl+D for easy access.

When I connect to one of these folders over SSH, on one particular server (running CentOS release 6.6 (Final)), I get this:

That's a CentOS logo showing up in my Nautilus, on Ubuntu. None of the other systems I connect to have cool favicons like that; they all show the folder-with-network-jack icon that's used over on the left in the bookmarks. Where did Nautilus get this icon? Is it detecting the OS of the remote host? Is there some kind of SSH favicon standard that I don't know about? Can I set icons for my other systems that I access?