Hi all,

when I try to add a user it fails to make the corresponding home directory. I can still su to the user, set the password, and everything else.
the output is as follows:

$ useradd username
useradd: cannot create home directory /home/username

I read that this could be a result of there not being enough space but if I do df -h, i see that only 88% of the memory is being used.

All help is appreciated,

Xenia

"useradd -m username" will create a home directory. By default, useradd alone will not. Add -k to add files from your skeleton directory. This is all in the man page.

What is your distro? Try turning off autofs and see if it works.

Personally, learning to use useradd is a good thing because it helps you better learn how to add users to your system, but I tend to get lazy with certain things such as adding a user so I use adduser instead.

If you want to try adduser, either create a new user with a different name or first delete the original user you created with userdel. See the man pages for details.

Hi,

Which Linux Distribution,you are using?

Hope you are trying to create the user with root.

also try

useradd -d /home/user1 user1

In some distributions you need to create home directory manually and specify that in useradd command.

Check this file !

;> vim /etc/default/useradd

# useradd defaults file
GROUP=100
HOME=/home
INACTIVE=-1
EXPIRE=
SHELL=/bin/bash
SKEL=/etc/skel
CREATE_MAIL_SPOOL=yes

hi do the following
#groupadd youruser
#useradd -g youruser -s /bin/bash -m -k /dev/null youruser
It will create a home directory, set the default shell to bash, point the skeleton to /dev/null, set userid and groupid to the same id.



or simply use
#adduser youruser

Hope it solves your problem.

Hi guys thank you for all the input!

I am running all the commands as root. My distro is centos 5.0
all of the below gave me the same error as before, "unable to create home directory /home/username"

# adduser username

#groupadd youruser
#useradd -g youruser -s /bin/bash -m -k /dev/null youruser

#useradd -d /home/user1 user

#useradd -m username

i looked at /etc/default/useradd
and it looked just like the example you gave me raviteja_s


I'm not sure how to turn off autof can you please help me out a bit on that one. Also, are there any other ideas?
Thank you all very much!

hello,

you can set in /etc/login.defs

change the value from no to yes
CREATE_HOME yes

but with -m it should work, maybe a stupid thing but what if your partition mounted in readonly?
please check/give the output of "mount" command

Hi,

Thank you
the output from mount as well as from doing ls -ls on the /home directory shows that root has read,write, and execute privileges.

also /etc/login.defs has the default already at yes.

is autofs running?

service autofs status
service autofs stop

chkconfig autofs off
or
edit /etc/auto.master or /etc/auto.misc to not automount home directories.

If autofs is automounting home directories then it will not allow directory creation in /home

hi,

Thank you for your idea, but autofs is not running,

$ service autofs status
automount is stopped

What happens if you mkdir /home/username manually?

I get the same error, "unable to create directory." Even running that command as root.

I would install strace if it is not already there and run 'strace mkdir /home/foo'
then post the output here and maybe one of us can spot something.