Re: NIS And /home Dirs On Client Systems
In article <[🔎] 42570EBB.6000601@familiasanchez.net>,
Roberto C. Sanchez <roberto@familiasanchez.net> wrote:
>Hal Vaughan wrote:
>> I noticed, a few years ago, when I first set up an NIS server, that even
>> though the NIS clients get the full password files, that doesn't mean home
>> directories are automatically created for that user. I wrote my own Perl
>> util that reads the passwd file with 'ypcat passwd', then gets the names,
>> makes the home dirs, and chowns them.
>>
>> Now, while setting up new systems, I'm wondering: Is this a flaw in NIS, or
>> what? How do others handle it? Is there something else to handle this I
>> don't know about?
>>
>
>What you probably want is autofs (a.k.a. automounter). You specify
>/home as the mount point to watch and then tell the /etc/auto.home
>file where (on which server, IP, and so on) the home directories
>actually reside.
Well no, you don't want that. Not initially.
You want to run an NFS server on the master system, and mount
/home as an NFS filesystem on the client, so that the homedirs
are shared.
Once you have that running, you might want to use autofs as a
second step. The advantage of autofs is that it mounts the (NFS)
filesystem when it is needed. The other option is to mount it
from /etc/fstab which can be problematic if you boot the client
when the server is down or non-responsive.
If you don't want shared homedirs, just automatic creation of
a homedir if it doesn't exist, read up on pam_mkhomedir.
Mike.
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