Solaris Systems Administrator’s Guide, Second Edition:Administering User Accounts and Groups

Table of Contents

The following steps describe how to share a home directory from a 5.x server. The procedure for sharing home directories from a 4.x server uses the export command.

1. Type share and press Return to find out whether the home directory has already been shared. If the home directory is listed, you will see information that looks like this:

oak% su
Password:
# share
-            /export/home      rw    ""
#

If the home directory is not listed, perform the following steps to set it up so that it can be shared by other systems. You perform these steps once for each /export/home-dir directory. By convention, these are named /export/home, /export/home1, /export/home2, and so on.

2. Edit the file /etc /dfs /dfstab and add this line:

share -F nfs /export/<home-dir>

3. Type shareall -F nfs and press Return. All the share commands in the /etc/dfs/dfstab file are executed so that you do not need to reboot the system. If you reboot the system, the share command is automatically run.

4. Type ps -ef | grep mountd and press Return. If the daemon mountd is running, the procedure is complete. This example shows that a mountd is not running. If mountd is not running, follow the next step.

# ps -ef | grep mountd
    root    221    218  16  18:07:25 pts/1  Ø:ØØ grep mountd

5. Type /etc/init.d/nfs.server start and press Return. The daemons required for sharing file directories are started.

NOTE: If your network is not running NISf or NIS+, you need to add the home directory server's Internet Protocol (IP) address and system name to the /etc/hosts file on the user's system. You can use the Admintool: Hosts window to edit the local /etc/hosts file.

If you use disk quotas, set up a disk quota for the user.

After you have created the user's home directory, you must make it available. You make the home directory available either by adding it to the Auto_home database (the preferred method) for use by AutoFS, or by adding an entry to the /etc/vfstab file on the user's system for NFS mounting.

NFS - Mounting the Home Directory

If the directory (disk space) for a user's home directory is located on another system and AutoFS is not being used to make that space available, follow these steps to NFS-mount the home directory:

1. Become superuser on the user's system.

2. Edit the /etc/vfstab file and create an entry for the user's home directory. For example, to create an entry for user ignatz with a home directory on server oak, you would add this line to the file:

oak:/export/home1/ignatz - /home/ignatz nfs - yes rw,intr

3. To create the mount point on the user's system, type mkdir /home/ login-name and press Return.

NOTE: The home directory does not have the same name on the user's system as it does on the server. For example, /export/home/ignatz on the server is mounted as /home/ignatz on the user's system.

4. Type chown login-name /home/login-name and press Return. The user now owns the home directory.

5. Type chgrp primary-GID /home/login-name and press Return. The user's primary group has permission to access the user's home directory.

6. Type mountall and press Return. All entries in the current vfstab file (whose automnt fields are set to Yes) are mounted.

7. To verify that all entries are mounted, type mount and press Return. The file systems that are mounted are displayed.

Defining the User's Environment

To completely set up the user account, you must also:

• Define default initialization files

• Set up a mail account

• Set up a printer

Table of Contents