SMB Autohome Shares
The autohome share feature eliminates the administrative task of defining and maintaining home directory shares for each user that accesses the system through the SMB protocol. The system creates autohome shares when a user logs in, and removes them when the user logs out. This process reduces the administrative effort needed to maintain user accounts, and increases the efficiency of service resources.
For example, if /home is a home directory that contains subdirectories for users auser and buser, you can manually define the shares as follows:
However, defining and maintaining directory shares in this way for each user is inconvenient. Instead, you can use the autohome feature.
To configure the autohome feature, you need to specify autohome share rules. For example, if a user's home directory is /fort/buser, the autohome path is /fort. The temporary share is named buser. Note that the user's home directory name must be the same as the user's login name. See How to Create a Specific Autohome Share Rule.
When a user logs in, the SMB server looks for a subdirectory that matches the user's name based on any rules that have been specified. If the server finds a match and if that share does not already exist, the subdirectory is added as a transient share. When the user logs out, the server removes that transient share.
Some Windows clients log a user out after 15 minutes of inactivity, which results in the autohome share disappearing from the list of defined shares. This behavior is expected for SMB autohome shares. Even after an SMB autohome share is removed, the share reappears when the user attempts to access the system (for example, in an Explorer window).
Note:
If you are using autohome share, you cannot allow other users to access files in your home directory. All autohome shares are removed when the SMB server is restarted.