Users wishing to see non-mounted home directories...

[Scott Catterill]

Greetings..

I have recently upgraded our home directory structure from it's original structure (large number of hard links to various hard drives) to a more modern structure, using autofs & automount maps..

My auto_home file looks like:
joeblow hostname:/.home41:jowblow
janedoe hostname:/.home42:janedoe

This system works, but of course only the active home directories are visible from /home. Some users (due to legacy reasons) wish to see all of the home directories, at all times.

Is there a way to accomplish this? I have told them to use "finger" to find what home directory goes with a specific user, but I would prefer a more efficient solution..

On a related note, since this change, the system logs "automountd[696]: /etc/mnttab: Permission denied" in it's syslog.log file. I haven't found a pattern to this yet (the timestamps seem to be scattered all over the day, even during quiet times). I have checked my entire automount map, and all entries are valid... Any ideas?

I am running HPUX 11.0 on a RP5470, with the Sept. 2003 servicepacks loaded.

Any advice would be appreciated..

--Scott Catterill
--SysAdmin, General Dynamics Canada

[Pete Randall]

Scott,

If you could set up soft links that would connect /home/blah to hostname:/home/blah, the users would be able to cd to /home/blah without having to know what host the directory actually resides on. Of course this gets you back into maintaining links but I think it's a bit simpler.


Pete

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Scott,

If all the home dirs are on another single system you would have the option of just automounting the entire home dir structure from it. That way the users would see all the actual user home dirs as well as have access to theirs.
If they're scattered across multiple systems or are not all in a single dir structure then you wouldn't have that option.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Scott,

This is the drawback of using indirect mounts. You will need to try direct mount if the users want to see all of the home directories. However, with direct mount you will lose the capability of manipulating your maps without restarting automountd.

Otherway is for you to setup a cronjob or something to do a 'cd' to each of the home directories in home41 and home42 on the nfs client which means you will have to keep track of all the users on the NFS server. This way those home directories will always show up.

-Sri