[oi-dev] Ideas about fixing useradd -m

[Andrew Gabriel]

On 28/07/2016 09:17, Udo Grabowski (IMK) wrote:
> On 28/07/2016 09:04, Alexander Pyhalov wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
>
> As you said, it's too specific. Users using NFS mounted directories
> for /home have wildly different setups (we alone had three completely
> different approaches in a decade), they know what they do. So the
> best option is to leave it as it is, either the admin uses the -b
> option, or don't  use the -m option at all since he creates that
> directory by different measures.

Agree.
It's the wrong fix for the problem of useradd not working out of the box.

A better (and much simpler) fix would be for useradd to use /export/home 
as the default for homedirs, which would make useradd on a new 
stand-alone install just work.

If you want useradd to work with maps, it's going to need a ton more 
smarts which aren't in it at the moment, and I bet people with 
widespread use of maps still wouldn't use it, so I think there's little 
point in that effort.

-- 
Andrew