[QUOTE BY= wilersh] I have user home areas on my Xserve (10.3.5) shared with NFS to some Solaris 7 machines. On the Solaris machines I have NIS maps set to automount home areas. For home areas I put on the Xserve I get a permission denied error when trying to login to a user account that has the home area on the Xserve. I can see the share just fine as any user by cd’ing to it through the /net mount point on the Solaris machine, It just won’t mount home areas.
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The problem is that by default Mac OS X won’t allow clients to mount subdirectories of a sharepoint. For example, say you’re exporting /Volumes/home via NFS and you have your Solaris box configured to mount macosxbox:/Volumes/home/username as /home/username whenever username logs in. Well, this doesn’t work by default with Mac OS X’s NFS daemon.

Very annoying.

I’ve found that you have to set the “alldirs” export option. to do this you’ll have to use either NetInfo Manager or the command line NetInfo utilities, as Workgroup Manager does not support this setting (more about that in a moment).

I typically use the command line utility. You have to do something like this:

niutil -insertval . /exports/\\/Volumes\\/home opts alldirs 0

the -mergeprop option may also work, but I’ve always used insertval

Note the use of backslashes to escape the forward slashes in the name of the directory you’re exporting.

After you’ve inserted the value (use “niutil -read . /exports/\\/Volumes\\/home” to verify) you need to run the following command to tell the daemon that you’ve made changes: kill -1 `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`

(those are backticks)

Now for the really nasty bit: if you EVER try to make any change to this share point in Workgroup Manager, it will REMOVE the “alldirs” option!! So never try to do that, or else remember that you’ll have to do this all over again!!

I’ve filed a bug report with Apple (#3715493) but I don’t think they’ve done anything about it yet.