What should the home directory for machines be?

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Wed Jan 21 21:26:59 GMT 2004


On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 22:59, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 11:51, Stefan (metze) Metzmacher wrote:
> > Simo Sorce wrote:
> > 
> > > Thinking twice, probably it is better to detect the accunt type and set
> > > the home dir to somthing like /tmp or /dev/null 
> > /dev/null isn't a directory, so it's not wise to use this as homedirectory.
> > 
> > maybe some admin tools will check the type a homedir and maybe change 
> > the file /dev/null into a directory /dev/null...
> > (that happend to me a view years ago)
> > I can't do anything after this, only starting a rescue system and 
> > recreate /dev/null as dev file.
> 
> OK, it was simply an example, /tmp is fine, but the objection is about
> the creation of a real home directory for machines.

First - having a non-unique home directory for machines will bite us
*really* badly, when people start using their machine identity to login,
and browse the [homes] share.  Remember, that was the point we added
this in the first place.  I'm not going to do anything to make machines
'second class citizens' again, it's only going to bite us.

Home directories are only set by winbind, as you know, and it's up to
tools like pam_mkhomedir to make them.

My questions is *only* is is acceptable/required to have a tailing $ in
a home directory, or should we decided that the current status of a
trailing _ is a safer solution, and avoid the extra work.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net
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