[CentOS] home on nfs

[Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane, JXVS]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: hw [mailto:hw at adminart.net]
> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2017 12:02 PM
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] home on nfs
> 
> Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> writes:
> 
> > On Oct 28, 2017, at 23:15, hw <hw at adminart.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> writes:
> >>
> >>>> On Oct 27, 2017, at 10:21, hw <hw at adminart.net> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Hi,
> >>>>
> >>>> I have the home directory of a user on an nfs server and mount it on a
> >>>> client.  When the user logs in, they end up in the root directory rather
> >>>> than in their actual home directory and need to cd into it.
> >>>>
> >>>> The user can read and write to their home directory, so it kinda works
> >>>> fine --- but only kinda.  When the user starts emacs, some of the
> >>>> settings in ~/.emacs are not applied, but the saved desktop is being
> >>>> loaded.
> >>>>
> >>>> Both machines are running Centos 7.4.  What could be wrong with the nfs
> >>>> mount?
> >>>
> >>> Sounds like you haven’t set the selinux Boolean for NFS homedirs.
> >>> setsebool -P use_nfs_home_dirs 1
> >>
> >> Oh, indeed, I didn´t know that I need to do that.
> >>
> >> Do I do this on the client or on the server or both?
> >
> > Just the client.
> 
> Thanks, I tried that and it works now :)
> 

If you find that the problem comes back in the near future (or perhaps check as a preventative), you should look to see if the client machine is using the 'soft' mount option instead of 'hard,intr' on the home dirs.  A few years ago it took me better than a month to figure out that some other admin had (on some machines) thought that using soft would cause less waiting on reboots, but we found that the side effect on home directories was corrupt data and strange issues on user login. (soft can work OK if there is a longish timeout between mount request and mount use, but if it is quick like autofs at login, then soft falls down.)

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