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 </PRE> <PRE> Received: from hobbes.crc.com [192.251.235.201] by mail.crc.com (ccMail Link to SMTP R8.30.00.7) ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 02:27:43 -0500 Return-Path: <owner-suse-linux-e@suse.com> Received: from mailrelay1.crc.com(really [205.149.60.26]) by hobbes.crc.com via sendmail with esmtp id <m0zeDYw-000LJUC@hobbes.crc.com> for <linux1@mail.crc.com>; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 02:22:34 -0500 (EST) (Smail-3.2 1996-Jul-4 #4 built 1997-Mar-21) Received: from mail.suse.com (fw2.suse.com [209.0.51.4]) by mailrelay1.crc.com (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id CAA04582 for <linux1@mail.crc.com>; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 02:19:43 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) by mail.suse.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA26266; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 22:36:07 -0800 Received: by mail.suse.com (bulk_mailer v1.5); Thu, 12 Nov 1998 22:35:43 -0800 Received: (from mdom@localhost) by mail.suse.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id WAA26259 for suse-linux-e-outgoing; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 22:35:42 -0800 Received: from www.faw.uni-ulm.de (www.faw.uni-ulm.de [134.60.100.4]) by mail.suse.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA26255 for <suse-linux-e@suse.com>; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 22:35:39 -0800 Received: (qmail 25539 invoked from network); 13 Nov 1998 06:35:29 -0000 Received: from ultra2.faw.uni-ulm.de (HELO mailserv.faw.uni-ulm.de) (134.60.101.174) by www-intern.faw.uni-ulm.de with SMTP; 13 Nov 1998 06:35:29 -0000 Received: (qmail 22808 invoked by uid 0); 13 Nov 1998 06:35:27 -0000 Received: from dial-up9.faw.uni-ulm.de (HELO faw.uni-ulm.de) (corsepiu@134.60.101.39) by mailserv.faw.uni-ulm.de with SMTP; 13 Nov 1998 06:35:27 -0000 Message-ID: <<A HREF="msg00316.html">364BD492.622C83AE@faw.uni-ulm.de</A>> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 07:41:22 +0100 From: Ralf Corsepius <corsepiu@faw.uni-ulm.de> Organization: Ralf Corsepius X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.1.125 i686) X-Accept-Language: de-DE MIME-Version: 1.0 To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SuSE Linux] autofs and home directories References: <<A HREF="msg00251.html">19981112110557.G9509@spruce.lsd.ornl.gov</A>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Sender: owner-suse-linux-e@suse.com Reply-To: suse-linux-e@suse.com X-Mailinglist: suse-linux-e Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by mailrelay1.crc.com id CAA04582