Michael Galloway wrote:
hmmm ...
i have a question about autofs and home directories. i have suse on a laptop, the laptop has 'local' users (users with home directories on the laptop) and it has Žnon-local' users (users mounting their home directories via autofs). it seems that autofs mounts over /home at boot time, even if no 'remote' users are logged into the system.
the symptom is that /home is empty when the system boots with autofs and /home has local home direcories that are there when autofs is not started at boot time.
i guess i could move the local home directories to a different mount point but this still seems odd to me.
is there a better way to make this work?
No. automount mount point and physical mount point have to be different. I.e. you can't have /home/user1 on machine 1 and mount /home/user2 from machine 2 as /home/users2 on machine 1. You have two alternatives: 1) Move your physical user directories to another subdirectory and use /home as autofs mount point E.g. keep all your physical user directories under some arbitrary local directory (e.g. /users/user1, /users/user2 ..) on each machine and use /home as autofs/automount point. The advantage then is that all users still have there automounted home directory under /home/user1, /home/user2 ... 2) Keep your physical user directories local under /home on each machine and use a different autofs mount point. E.e. use /users as automount point and keep the physical user directories under local /home/user1, /home/user2 ... directory. In this case, the advantage is that do not need to move users home directories, however all users will have to use /users/<username> as their home directory. Generally speaking, users should never need to know where their physical home directory is located, but should always use the same directory name for $HOME on the whole network. This is one of the purposes automounters like autofs are designed for. So if your users now use /home/<username>, I'd clearly prefer alternative 1). However some sysadmins also prefer solution 2). Ralf - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e