SUMMARY: Automounting remote homedirs

Mika Tuupola (tuupola@mehu.appelsiini.net)
Thu, 24 Apr 1997 02:19:30 +0300 (EET DST)

The problem was solved in 2 hours and it was quite obvious.
I'll blame my poor knowledge on Solaris nfs scheme (since it
differs from the platform I have been working with before
[ OSF/Digital Unix, Irix, FreeBSD ])

Solaris NFS it a bit more paranoid about who it lets to mount
the exported filesystems (which is a good thing). Anyway here is
the original question and summary:

** ORIGINAL QUESTION **

SITUATION:

Running 2 SPARC5 machines with Solaris 2.5.1 (host-a and host-b) I
have 2 kind of users: a) users who can only log to one of the
hosts (host-a _or_ host-b) b) user who can log on to both of the
hosts (host-a and host-b).

The users who can only log to one of the host have the following
entries in the machines /etc/auto_home :

first on host-a
normaluser host-a:/export/home/normaluser

and of course on the host-b
normaluser host-b:/export/home/normaluser


Users who can log to both hosts have their homedirs physically
on host-a and the following entries in /etc/autohome:

first in host-a
multiuser host-a:/export/home/multiuser

and in host-b
multiuser host-a:/export/home/multiuser

PROBLEM


The "multiuser" has of course all the proper entries in both
hosts passwd files. Now the problem is when I try to login to
host-b it doesnt mount the homedirectory from the host-a
and I get No directory! Logging in with home=/.



QUESTION

Console says (on host-b) nfs-server host-a not responding .
Seems I am missing something quite obvious in here, like the
proper way to set up nfs server for automounting homedirectories
to remote machine.

What am I missing?

What is the proper procedure for setting up this kind of
automounting of homedirectories?

** ORIGINAL QUESTION ENDS **

** SUMMARY **

The problem was simply faulty line in /etc/dfs/dfstab. There
was

share -F nfs -o rw=myhost /export/home

which should have been

share -F nfs -o rw=myhost.mydomain.com /export/home

This was all because the server machine sees the client as
myhost.domain.com and _not_ only myhost. The Solaris NFS
was a bit more paranoid than the NFS servers on platforms
I've been used to. The correct entry in dfstab was the
answer in my case.

Remember to do unshare and share after you alter the
/etc/dfs/dfstab.

If you have samekind of problems check also these places:

* /etc/auto_master file on each host it should refer to
/etc/auto_home

* Then check whether you are sharing the directories on each host
(/etc/dfs/dfstab or showmount or share after editing
/etc/dfs/dfstab)

* Is the nfsserver running? (if you dont have an entry in
/etc/dfs/dfstab the nfserver wont be run after reboot.

* start the autofs as root /etc/init.d/autofs start on each
client (if it isnt running?)


Alsa it was proposed that the easiest way would be to put all
hosts on the same netgroup (/etc/netgroup) which the filesystem
would be exported to. This wouldnt work for me because I am
not running nis. Would make thing much easier though.

I would like to thank following people for their help:

Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.COM>
Matthew Stier <mstier@hotmail.com>
Tim Carlson <tim@santafe.edu>
Kevin Tse <ktse@NVidia.COM>
? <varshney@pacbell.net>


--
Mika Tuupola                    	       tuupola@appelsiini.net
Appelsiini Networks                        http://www.appelsiini.net/