Description Top

On a freshly installed Solaris system cannot write to /home or /net.
Have tried to change permissions (555), but even root cannot write to
it.  What am I doing wrong?

Solution Summary Top

You're not doing anything wrong.  The /net and /home are special
directories.  They are the mount points for automounter to automatically
mount the exported file systems on the net and the user home
directories.

To disable automounter completely rename the /etc/rc2.d/S74autofs to
/etc/rc2.d/s74autofs.  But if you want to configure the autofs to mount
other file systems but disable the /net & /home mounts, just comment out
the /net & /home lines in the /etc/auto_master file.

FAQ ID   Synopsis   Date
3202   Why does Solaris produce a slice called /export/home rather than  /home 3 Jul 2000

Description Top

Web install of Solaris 8 produces a slice /export/home/ rather than /home and
/home will not accept sub-directories.  Why is this?

Solution Summary Top

The standard installation is tailored for larger workgroups where you
may have multiple NFS servers and/or multiple user partitions.  In Sun's
default configuration, the automounter has control of /home via an
indirect mount point defined in /etc/auto_master.  The idea is to
create the user's real home filesystem in server:/export/home or
elsewhere and to create an entry in your auto.home or auto_home
NIS/NIS+ automounter map (or /etc/auto_home) to mount the user's real
filesystem at /home/username via the automounter.  The user's then
see their home filesystem at /home/username on all hosts in your
workgroup.

The advantage is that you can perform maintenance (move users filesystems
between partitions or servers) without any impact to the user.  Some
packages will configure user environments with absolute paths to home
directories and users frequently hard code paths into scripts, so this
strategy neatly circumvents problems arising from moving home directories
around.

If you are running standalone and don't care to use the automounter, all
you have to do is to edit /etc/auto_master and comment out the line
beginning with /home.  Then run the "automount" command to tell
automountd to reread its config files.  The entry in /etc/mnttab for
/home should be purged and you will have free run of /home.  You can
prevent automountd from starting in the first place by removing
/etc/rc2.d/S74autofs or renaming to something other than S* or K*.

#vi /etc/auto_master
remark home