Hello everyone,
i have managed to setup a small autofs proof of concept between 2 machines.
the server is an nfs server and has many users.
The client only has 1 user so far (a test username taken from the server that also has the same uid in the 2 machines).

so I exported through nfs the home dir of that test user as
and updated the client to mount this nfs share as:
This worked fine, and from autofs side i'm also set to mount many users IF I export individually their shares on the server.

Is there a way to nfs-export the whole /home directory somehow, without having to do each user manually?

Ideally i would export /home (or /home/*) somehow and be able to mount with autofs all /home/userX !

I understand also that I can use LDAP or NIS to export user databases from a server, but how do you export home directories in those cases of having thousands of users?

thank you for your help!

you just export /home itself, the mount command for the subdirectory should still work fine in automount. Note though, if you're using normal user accounts for anyone on /home it shouldn't matter about mounting the specific users home directory. You could just mount the whole thing, as the other user directories will be unavailable to the normal user anyway.

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hmmm so finally, now that you explicitly said that it should be happening, (and it is not working for me, I realised that it is because of soft links to home directories that my setup doesn't work).

So I should export the proper homes folder

Thank you for clarifying this!