nis homedir troubles

[Jeremy Allison]

Paul Ostro wrote:

> Could anyone on the Samba team confirm what is meant to happen with nis
> homedir, please? Is it a feature used a lot (and hence I am being daft in
> not being able to get it working), or has it got known problems? Maybe a
> docs/homedir.txt file would be useful?

Paul Allen <paul.allen at redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com> wrote :

> I have four pure NFS fileservers.  By "pure", I mean that they are
> absolutely not NFS clients.  I do not automount /home on my fileservers.
> I have Samba 2.0.0-alpha13) running on all four servers with these
> lines in each smb.conf file:
> 
>   nis homedir = True
>   homedir map = auto_home
> 

This all looks good - but the critical part of this is - is one of 
these servers acting as a Windows 95/98 logon server ?

It's been a while since I looked at the homedir map code
but my understanding of this is that you only need these
lines in the Samba server that is acting as the logon 
server.

The way it's supposed to work is that the Win95/98 client
does a broadcast on port UDP 138 to find the logon server,
nmbd responds and then the client attaches to the IPC$ 
share on the server as the logging on user and does a 
NetUserGetInfo rap call down the IPC$ pipe to get the
info about the user.

Part of this info (handled in ipc.c in the Samba code)
is the "home server" and "home path" (the names are
kind of sketchy without trawling through the code).

It's at this point (getting this info) that the
substitutions from the NIS automount maps are
done.

Once the client receives this info back it then goes
off and mounts the given share from the given home
server as the home directory for the logging on user,
ie. contacting the Samba server holding the users
home directory directly, not doing anything more
with the Samba server that is the logon server.

Does this clarification help ?

Cheers,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.


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