UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I installed Solaris 10 (8/11) and added an account for myself. It lives in

Code:

/export/home/{name}

but /etc/passwd shows it is

Code:

/home/{name}

where it seems to be mounted like a filesystem. I tried to
create another account from the command line but it doesn't work the same way.
I can't find anything in the man page for useradd to duplicate this
functionality nor does a search on the internet show anyone else who has made it
work.

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks in advance,

Edward Hooper

---------- Post updated at 04:04 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:20 PM ----------

Looks like I get to answer my own question because I did another search and, finally, found the solution.

Create the user account as usual in

Code:

 /export/home:useradd -u <userid> -g <groupid> -m -s <shell> -d \ /export/home/<name> <name>

Then modify the home directory location:

Code:

usermod -d /home/<name> <name>

Add a line to /etc/auto_home so it gets mounted when the user logs in:

Code:

<name> 127.0.0.1:/export/home/<name>

And lastly, just to make certain it all works:

Code:

svcadm enable autofs

And that seems to work for me. I did notice that after the users log out the home directories are unmounted. Well, most of them. The account created at startup stays mounted even after I log out so there is something I'm missing. If anyone knows please let me know.

Did you leave any children of that id running under any id?

I'm not exactly certain what that means. I did select Save current setup on log out. Would that make the home directory stay mounted?

If you have daemons that were launched from that id using sudo or the like, they may have the dir open. Do an fuser on the dir.

I tried /export/home/<name>, /home/<name>, and /home/<name>/* as parameters to fuser and I didn't get any results. It's been a while since I used fuser and I don't remember all of the options. The man page didn't help much either. I seem to remember another, similar command that would take the user name as a parameter and show the open files along with the process that had them open.

What I did do was:

Code:

ps -ef | grep <name>

and found that there was a process running in the background (/usr/bin/VBoxClient) that I killed and it released the mount. When I logged back in as the user it started the process again.

I'm fine with this as long as I know that's what happening.

While fuser is slow, it is very useful. Some versions take one file name, others many, but the output to stdout is pids white space separated, and to stderr file names and letters indicating what sort of open is present, although they blend together on the screen.

Code:

$ fuser .
.:    13350c   26022c   26561c   13349c   27207c   23147c   25528c   26972c   13
384c   18137c   26033c   26602c   26031c   26238c   28253c    8818c   25659c   2
6052c   13352c   20145c   16947c   25661c   20017c   13346c   28255c   26217c   
13343c   13347c   18140c   17035c   27201c   18135c   22761c   25530c    8819c  
 13351c   25522c   27119c   22759c   27190c   13344c   25643c   18136c   16788c
   25642c
 
$ ps -fp "`fuser .`"
.: ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc
ps: wrong PID number 
     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY       TIME COMMAND
 my__id 26033 26031  0  Aug 16  ttyp9     0:00 ksh
 .
 .
 .
 .

https://www.unix.com/man-page/all/1/fuser/

The tool lsof is more than powerful enough to find such, too, if you have it and permissions. It can snoop out remote hosts, socket numbers, all sorts of fd info:
Man Page for lsof (all Section 8) - The UNIX and Linux Forums

This is all running as root. When I tried

Code:

fuser /home/<name>

the output was

Code:

/home/<name>:

When I tried

Code:

fuser /home/<name>/.

the output was

Code:

/home/<name>/.:

When I changed directory to the home directory and tried

Code:

fuser .

the output showed process ids. I've been using various Unix and Linux boxen for 20 years and I've never seen a command behave this differently.

I have used lsof in that past. That was the command I remembered but couldn't put a name to. It's not on my system and I looked at the install CD for the package but didn't find it. Where can it be had for Solaris 10 8/11?