automounting in /home directory doesn't work
 

Hi all,

I want to let all users on my network use their home directory on the file server.

That is, user bar should use server:/home/bar as his home directory, rather than the local /home/bar.

I have chosen to use autofs to accomplish this.

The auto.master file looks like this:
/home /etc/auto.home

The auto.home file looks like this:
* -defaults,nosuid server:/home/&

Well, despite of the thousands of web pages describing this process as the way how to do it, it does NOT work.

When I change the auto.master to:
/foo /etc/auto.home

everything works fine, and the directories foo/bar and foo/baz etc. appear nicely.

In the case that I use /home as a mount point, no automount daemons start, and this is shown with the autofs status command.

Because it works fine in /foo and not in /home as the mount point, I came to the conclusion that it has something to do with choosing /home as mount point.

Since I can get it working in /foo, I am sure that the problem is NOT in:
- exporting the directories on the server
- setting up autofs, or auto.master or auto.home files
- nfs

When I mount the directory server:/home/bar manually on the mount point /home there is no problem, it is just that automount refuses to do this.

I could of course work around this problem to define a user's home directory as /foo/bar in the passwd file, but I don't think that is an elegant solution.

Any ideas someone?

jlinkels

Problem solved!
 

I found what caused the problem!

The /home directory was mounted from a different partition (/dev/hda5), and not simply a subdirectory under '/'

After removing the mount of /home from /etc/fstab I was able to use the automounter as described.

jlinkels

can you please post your auto.master and auto.home because i'm having the same EXACT problem! i would VERY much appreciate it

It's in my first post. Read it.

jlinkels