NFS Services Administrator's Guide

Configuring and Administering NFS
Configuring and Administering the NFS Automounter
Chapter 2 83
To Automount Users’ Home Directories with Wildcard
Characters
1. Make sure every user’s home directory is of the form
directory/servername/username, on the NFS servers where the
directories are located. For example, if the home directories are
located under the /home directory on server sage, user Claire’s home
directory pathname would be /home/sage/claire.
NOTE This configuration requires that users’ home directories be located
under the same directory on all systems in the network. On HP-UX
release 9.x or earlier, home directories are usually located under
/users. On HP-UX release 10.0 or later, home directories are usually
located under /home. For this reason, you should not set up this
configuration until all of your systems are running HP-UX release
10.0 or later.
2. Make sure the machines where users’ home directories are located
are set up as NFS servers and are exporting the home directories.
See “Configuring and Administering an NFS Server” on page 26.
3. In the /etc/passwd file on the NFS clients, or in the NIS passwd
map or NIS+ passwd table, configure the home directory of each user
as directory/servername/username, where servername is the
name of the machine where the user’s home directory is physically
located. For example, if home directories are mounted under /home
on NFS client thyme, Claire’s home directory, which is located on
server sage, would be configured as /home/sage/claire in the
/etc/passwd file on client thyme.
4. If you are using local files for your automounter maps, create a file
called /etc/auto_home on the NFS clients, and add the following
line to it. If you are using NIS to manage your automounter maps,
add the line to the /etc/auto_home file on the NIS master server.
* &:/home/& -nosuid
The asterisk (*) and ampersand (&) characters are explained in “To
Use Wildcard Characters as Shortcuts in Automounter Maps” on
page 78.