Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Automount Home Directories Over NFS in Linux

On RedHat Enterprise/CentOS...
assuming your home server is called "fs1" and is sharing out /home over NFS. You'll also want to make sure that both your home directory server and the server you're running autofs on has the same passwd/user info - ids, gids.

1. Make sure autofs is installed and running:

sudo chkconfig autofs on
sudo service autofs start

2. add "/home /etc/auto.home" to /etc/auto.master

3. create the file /etc/auto.home and add these lines:

* -fstype=nfs,rw,nosuid,soft fs1:/home/&

4. if you already have a /home dir, move it out of the way:

sudo mv /home /home.old

5. reload autofs

sudo service autofs reload

6. ls /home

You should see the users' home directories.