[oi-dev] Ideas about fixing useradd -m

[Alexander Pyhalov]

Hi.

There is an old issue (https://www.illumos.org/issues/263):
useradd -m tries to create home directory under /home, but /home is 
auto-mounted from /export/home.

For useradd -m to work, you should specify useradd -m -b /export/home 
..., but users created in such way are not equivalent to initial user, 
which we get on install, as for them mapping in /etc/auto_home is not 
created.

OI /dev had several patches to fix this:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/d6271a348bada25d0a512551be0ae6a9aa334d84 
(263 useradd is unable to create home directory)

and
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/70501a0c9a45806dbe4a81c2195b2647fa982f79
( 288 New homedirs should have auto_home entries)

I think that these patches are too specific to be accepted in illumos-gate.
What can we do with it? Perhaps we just remove all auto_home magic by 
default and create home directories under /export/home ?

We also could set something like
*    localhost:/export/home/&
in /etc/auto_home, but IIRC this leads to the following : if you try to 
access /home/bar you'll receive irritating error messages on console 
about missing /export/home/bar.


-- 
Best regards,
Alexander Pyhalov,
system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department