One of my users at work asked me recently about symlinking his network home folder to /home on his Mac running 10.9.2 and wanted to check to see if it was safe to do so.
In this case, the person in question works on both Fedora Linux, where his network home directory was mounted as /home/username, and on OS X. His network home directory was available via SMB on his Mac as smb://servername/home$/username. He wanted to be able to mount smb://servername/home$/username to /home/username on his Mac, so that it matched the mountpoint of his network home on his Fedora box.
At the time, here’s what I knew about /home:
1. Nothing appears to be stored in it by default
2. It’s listed in /etc/auto_master as a mountpoint
3. Time Machine does not back it up
After talking with Apple’s enterprise support folks and doing some additional research, the file that controls what’s mounted in /home is the /etc/auto_home auto mount file.
To do what my user wanted to do, the following entry could be added to /etc/auto_home to have the designated share mount as /home/username:
username -fstype=smbfs ://'DOMAIN;username':password@servername/home$/username
Note: If you have a password longer than 8 characters, or if the password has special characters in it (like “! # $ % & ‘ ( ) * + , – . / : ; & < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ { | } ~”), you may receive a “No locks available” error message and the share will not mount under /home. You will also receive a “No locks available” or similar “Host is down” error if the password is wrong or missing.
That said, having an SMB mount entry in /etc/auto_home may not a good idea for the following reasons:
1. The username and password will need to be stored in /etc/auto_home as part of the mount entry. autofs on OS X doesn’t support using Kerberos authentication, so there’s no good way to secure the connection.
2. The first person to access /home/username will have full access to the share as that user on the server. If this is a multi-user system, subsequent users will have no access to /home/username on that Mac.
If NFS is an available option, this may be better because no usernames or passwords will need to be stored in /etc/auto_home in order to mount an NFS share. If the network home is mountable from the server from a home NFS share, the following entry could be added to /etc/auto_home to have the designated share mount as /home/username:
username servername:/home/username
If you want to have an NFS mount show up under /home for each user that logs in, you can also use wildcards ( * ) and ampersands (&) in /etc/auto_home. For example, the following entry could be added to /etc/auto_home to have appropriate shares mount as /home/username_goes_here:
* servername:/home/&
For more information on properly formatting entries for /etc/auto_home, including information on using wildcards ( * ) and ampersands (&), I recommend reading the man page for /etc/automaster. The wildcard information is in the Wildcards section, while information about using ampersands is available in the Substituting the map key entry section.
