I stumbled on this after a seemingly successful installation of Solaris 9 on a Sparc Ultra 60.

In trying to add a new user using admintool, the process failed because it couldn't create the user's directory in /home. So, as root, I cd over to /home and discover that I can't even mkdir in that directory, manually. The error message I get is mkdir: failed to make directory "foo"; Operation inapplicable.

I do an ls and look at the permissions for /home and they are dr-xr-xr-x. I tried:
chmod 755 home
chmod u+w home
chmod 755 /home
chmod u+w /home

and none of the above work. I get the error message "can't change home"

I even tried cd-ing into the /home directory and:
chmod 755 .
chmod u+w .

Still no luck. Any thoughts? Thanks.

"Any thoughts?"

Is /home a mount point? It is often hard to change the permissions on a mount point. If so then umount /home, change the permissions, and mount it again.


-----------------------
Steve Stites

Are you running the autohome for user directories? This may prevent you from creating user directories in /home. Try disabling this or put your user directories in /export/home.

jailbait, That is a great suggestion, one that I would never have thought of. However, that's not the answer in my case. I think.

/export/home is a mount point, but I don't think there is any connection between that and /home. I looked closely, /export/home is not a symlink to /home or vice versa.

The whole problem seems really strange. A standard, default install not letting you set up new users because root can't write in the /home directory? What will they think of next?

stickman, I don't know if I'm running autohome, where can I check that? I tried man autohome and there is no entry. I tried autohome --help and the command is not found.

stickman, I did some Googling and found out about auto_home, and I did indeed have auto_home active. So you were right too, jailbait, /home was being used as a mount point, even though it was not listed when I issued the mount command. And users home directories belong in /export/home/.

I'm guessing that this setup is advantageous if your /export/home resides on another disk or even another server. My /export/home is on the same disk as the rest of my installation. Would there be any disadvantage to me disabling auto_home and just using /home for my users home directories? If I decided to do this, would this gum up the works for other applications or processes expecting to find a user's home directory in /export/home?

Thanks once again.

auto_home uses /home as the mount point for user directories in /export/home that it is configured to use.