Bug #263: useradd is unable to create home directory - OpenIndiana Distribution - illumos

Bug #263

useradd is unable to create home directory

Added by Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk about 10 years ago. Updated almost 10 years ago.

Status:

Resolved

Priority:

Normal

Assignee:

Albert Lee

Category:

OS/Net (Kernel and Userland)

Target version:

oi_148

Start date:

2010-09-26

Due date:

% Done:

50%

Estimated time:

Difficulty:

Tags:

Description

When trying to create a new user (here for icinga, a nagios fork), with useradd -m, this fails to create the homedir. The user is created, however, but homedir creation and so on must be done manually.

root@openindiana:/usr/src/icinga-1.0.3# useradd -m icinga
UX: useradd: ERROR: Unable to create the home directory: Operation not applicable.

root@openindiana:/usr/src/icinga-1.0.3# grep icinga /etc/passwd 
icinga:x:102:1::/home/icinga:/bin/sh

Related issues

History

Updated by Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk about 10 years ago

Seems this issue is related to auto_home somehow. When OI is installed, the initial user is created with home directory /export/home/username and added to /etc/auto_home. Adding a user with useradd -m will automatically try to create /home/username, which isn't allowed, since /home is just a mount point for auto_home. Manually creating /export/home/username, chmod'ing the dir and changing /etc/auto_home to * localhost:/export/home/& instead of username localhost:/export/home/& fixes this, but useradd -m really should work nevertheless.

roy

Updated by Jeppe Toustrup about 10 years ago

This should perhaps be changed to set the default home directory for new users to be /export/home/<username> instead of /home/<username> and also the change you mention to /etc/auto_home.

A workaround would be to run "useradd -D -b /export/home" before creating the user, that will make the default home directory for the user /export/home/<username>, and then don't hit into the auto_home stuff.

Updated by Albert Lee about 10 years ago

A nicer fix would be to teach useradd about autofs, although the extent to which you can actually do this is limited by access to automountd's internal state. A hack could be to prepend "/export" to a path if the filesystem is determined to be autofs.