/home/user not found at login
 

I have begun to set up Pink Tie Linux as a home offince server for windows machines on a home office. While working on getting Samba configured (success), I did something that has affected my login.
I get the message:
Your home directory is listed as '/home/khirst' but it does not appear to exist. Do you want to log in with the /(root)directory as your home directory?
If I select Yes, the session fails with a message saying User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored.
If I try to login in with SSH, I get:
Could not chdir to home directory /home/khirst: Premission denied
-bash: /home/khirst/.bash_profile: Permission denied.

I can log in as root by either method, only user login is affected.

Windows acces by samba works for public directories, but fails for access to /home/khirst, Message: \\Server\khirst is not accesible.

I have confirmed (while logged in as root) that /home/khirst does inded exist. I have tried several different permissions on both /home and /home/khirst (644, 755, even 777).

Why would this directory be not found at login? What should the proper permissions be for these two directories?

The directory should belong to the user it is for, and generally the group "users". So start with:

A sane default for permissions would be 755. This gives the user full control, and everyone else read/execute. You may want to use 700 though, which will give only the owner access to the directory. You definitely don't want to be doing 777 for home directories.

Also, check that the files inside of /home/khirst have the proper permissions and ownership, not just the base directory. If the individual files are set improperly, then you can use the "-R" switch on both chmod and chown to make them work recursively, or in other words, change all of the files that are contained within the directory they are pointed to.

Success
 

Changing the permissions of the directories did not work, but...

chmod -R 755 /home/khirst
chown -R khirst:users /home/khirst

DID work, I can now log in properly again. So the invisible .files inside the directory must have had the wrong permissions or ownership. I just wanted to follow up in case others have this problem.

Thanks for the help!!

Ken