Auto-mounted Solaris Home Directories Are Not Always Automatically Available to Windows NT Clients

The following description and workaround is intended for experienced Solaris system administrators only.

Solaris home directories that are stored remotely are ordinarily mounted automatically when users need to access their accounts. The current release of SunLink Server is not able to provide automatic access from Windows NT clients to Solaris home directories that are not stored on the SunLink Server system. However, home directories that are stored on the same system as the SunLink Server program are available to Windows NT clients.

The reason for this is that the autofs file system monitors all attempts to access directories, and if the file system is not accessed within a default period of five minutes, the file system becomes unmounted. Therefore, if a net share operation is performed on /home and then the share is connected from the client, the access to the home directory will be unmounted. This is because the autofs daemon does not detect that the user is accessing the directory from the Windows client system.

Workaround: Change the auto-mount master map entry for /home from --nobrowse to --browse so that SunLink Server can see the subdirectories of /home.