I'm working on moving our users to a netapp filer and I am trying to use the cifs.homedir option. My understanding is that this should allow the user to mount \filer\username as a cifs share even though their home directory is really on something like \filer\somedirectory\username

I can make this work just fine if I do this with my own account, as a domain admin. If I try to do this with any other users account (say a test user) or as Administrator (and attempt to change my own account) I get an error from Active Directory that reads "The home folder could not be created because: The network name cannot be found."

Any clues based on what I have said to point at what I am doing wrong? What else I might want to look at?

When using cifs.home_dir, you must login as username to attach to

\filer\username

In other words, you cannot login as USERA and attach to \filer\USERB. Only USERB can attach to \filer\USERB. The name of the home directory must match the name of the user. You might also want to look at the cifs.home_dir_namestyle if you run a mixed NFS and CIFS environment.

If your users need to be able to access the home directories of other users, then you will also need to explicitly share the top of your home directory tree. To access another user's home directory, a user attaches to the top level share and "drills down" to the home directory that they want.

This is how we have our filers set up. Most users are only interested in their own home directory, so they use \filer\username. But if they want to go into another user's directory, they can attach to \filer\home which is at the top of our home directory tree, and then drill down to the home directory that they want. Very few of our folks ever do this.

Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640

University of Virginia ITC Unix Support