I am working on a new UNIX box that has been delivered to us, and noticed that the /home directory has 555 permissions on it (dr-xr-xr-x). Any attempt to create write permissions fails on this directory (such as chmod 777), responding only with a message;

chmod: WARNING: can't change home

This is despite the fact that I am logged in as root. Is there a way out of this, or am I toast?

It may be that /home should have those permissions.

On Solaris:
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2 Aug 14 10:37 /home
df -k /home
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
auto_home 0 0 0 0% /home

What OS and is /home an auto_mount?

Good guess, this is Solaris. We are trying to create users with "useradd -m", but getting the error message "unable to create the home directory, operation not applicable". Thinking that this was related to permissions in "home" we've been trying to change it -this is a dummies site, after all .

The "df -k /home" command returned the results you anticipated.

"Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
auto_home 0 0 0 0% /home "

interestingly enough, this listing does not appear at all when "df -k" is run without home as argument.

Our site uses NIS with home directories on a NetApp server. The only way to create directories with this configuration is to be on a server that is Master in NIS and a Master of the NetApp server.

You may be hitting the same type of situation. If you are adding a local user, then put their home directory as /export/home/userX.