Automatic home directory creation

January Weiner january at uni-muenster.de
Mon Apr 3 12:07:34 UTC 2006


Hi again -- yet another problem.

I have users -- authenticated via LDAP -- coming from various "pots". 
I would like to create their home directories on the fly.

However, there are two problems - as follows.  The directory structure
of home differs greatly for the different "pots".  Say, one user might
have "/home/foo" and the other "/dfs/blah/boo/bar/foobar". 
pam_mkhomedir, as far as I understand it, does not create the whole
directory structure, but only the actual user home directory (foo or
foobar) and fails if, for example, "/dfs/blah/boo/bar/" does not
exist, but only "/dfs/blah/boo/".  But "bar" can be sometimes user- or
group- specific and subject to change.

Second problem: when you log in with ssh, pam_mkdirhome is run as
user, and if the user cannot create the home directory (which she or
he normally can't) no home directory will be created.

Ultimately, I would like to have the following happening at log in:

1) check whether home exist
2) if not, create it and assign the apropriate user rights
3) check where the user information came from; if it came from the
LDAP server, run pam_mount to mount the users shared volume through
SMB

The only idea I have now is to replace the mount command in pam_mount
with my own script.

j.

--
------------ January Weiner 3  ---------------------+---------------
Division of Bioinformatics, University of Muenster  |  Schloßplatz 4
(+49)(251)8321634                                   |  D48149 Münster
http://www.uni-muenster.de/Biologie.Botanik/ebb/    |  Germany




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