unable to change to home directory

[Michael Cline]

I have a user who is getting 'unable to change to home directory. Do you want to log in using / instead?' when he tries to log in. We are running HP-UX 10.20. I have added him to auto.home and run ypmake. He owns his home directory. On the server, he can log with no problem. Any ideas???

[Pete Randall]

Is his home NFS mounted? If it is, is it mounted? If not, why not?


Pete

[Michael Cline]

yes, it is already mounted

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The first thing that I would do is a ypcat auto.home (or whatever the map is named) on one of the clients displaying the problem. If that is okay, on the NFS host actually housing the user's home directory, check the permissions of the directory itself. Do an su - thisuser and see if you can get to this home directory via cd. Any member of the actual pathname may have search permissions turned off.

[Michael Cline]

when I do ypcat auto.home, it is okay. Plus, other users are not having any problems logging into their workstations, so it is just this user. I have checked permissions of the users home directory and he owns it. Any other ideas?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Again, as this user on the NFS server, it is very important to see if you can cd to this homedir because the problem could be higher up in the pathname. Do a ypcat passwd and make sure that this user's home directory agrees with your auto.home map. Also, does this user have a local passwd entry that is overriding the '+' entry?

I also assume that this directory is not being explicitly NFS mounted as well as automounted. If all else fails, stop and restart the automounter.

[Michael Cline]

On the server I can cd to his home directory. On the workstations I cannot. When I am logged in as root on the server and su - username, the prompt is 'username@servername:', and a 'pwd' shows '/home/username'. When I do the same on the workstations, the prompt is '%' and a 'pwd' shows '/'. When I try to cd to his home directory on the workstations, I get 'no such file or directory'. Everything else seems to be set up okay....

[MarkSyder]

I had one of these a few weeks ago. I can remember the processes I went through to fix it, but I can't remember which was the solution.

1. Confirm that the workstation(s) is included in the group the directory is exported to.

2. Check your auto_vol file to see what the directory will be called on the workstation(s).

3. Log into the user's workstation and type cd /vol/

where is the first part of the home directory. If this works do cd where is the first subdirectory. Carry on until you find a directory you cannot cd to. You have then found the problem.

I'll keep on thinking about what I did in case this doesn't fix it. If I think of anything else I'll post it.

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)