Is it possible to have multiple default shares for CIFS homes? I am running 5.1.2P2.
For example, let's say I have two quota trees on a NetApp. One is /vol/vol0/home_eng and the other is /vol/vol0/home_finance. Let's say home_eng is exported via NFS (for engineers) and home_finance is not (because it contains sensitive information such as employee salaries).
I want to allow people to access both via CIFS. It is assumed that there will not be any username collisions between the two hierarchies. So if there is a /home_eng/bob directory, there won't be a /home_finance/bob directory (and vice versa).
We have over 20,000 users so we have built a hierarchy of home directory directories. For example, the home directory for user abc9d is here:
/h1/a/ab/abc9d
To solve the CIFS share problem, we have created another directory that has nothing but symbolic links in it:
/home/shares/abc9d -> /h1/a/ab/abc9d /home/shares/efg8h -> /h1/e/ef/efg8h
/h1 is in our root volume. You can specify different volumes using the /vol/volname syntax like this:
/home/shares/abc9d -> /vol/vol0/h1/a/ab/abc9d
and we have set up the default share like this:
options cifs.home_dir /home/shares
and it has worked just fine from 4.3 on (we are now running 5.0.2).
We have also made a top level share for /h1 so that users can get to each other's directories, depending on permissions, of course.
Had we put all 20000 users in a flat hierarchy, the top level share would have been quite unwieldy. Now folks have to "drill down" to get to someone else's directory, but on our system the largest directory they ever see is
/h1/j/jm which currently has 328 users in it.
CAUTION: We discovered a bug in 5.0.2 such that if your /home/shares symlink passes through another symlink, the filer crashes when a user tries to access his share! You are safe if your /home/shares symlink points directly to the user's directory. (We just got too fancy with our symlinks!)
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support