Mount users' Windows home folders from RHEL6

Question

I've just set up AD authentication with my RHEL6 servers (using SSSD/LDAP/Kerberos). Now I'd like users' Windows home folders to be mounted automatically when they log in to one of the Linux machines.

My problem is that:

-there are far too many users to have entries in /etc/fstab

-users can't mount without superuser privileges, so I can't just put a line in their startup scripts

-there is no pam_mount available for RHEL

-autofs doesn't seem to play nicely with CIFS and Kerberos

Does anyone out there have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Automatically? Haven't sorted that out as CIFS shares need the user to authenticate. A credentials file would be needed and that isn't an option. A work around would be if their home directory is on a SAN that supports NFS, too.

A solution for unpriviledged users mounting in RHEL6 is to add them to the 'fuse' group and use fusermount with AutoFS. (Under Gnome, the gvfs-mount front-end.). (Check out my previous question history on GVFS.)

Answer 2

** Edit opps there is not pam.mount **

I'm using ubuntu mind you, but this should work for centos/redhat;

Try using pam.mount so when they login at boot it mounts and umount when they logout;

I found with cifs-utils this worked;

<volume uid="8000-800000"  user="*" fstype="cifs" server="windowsservername.domain" path='%(USER)' mountpoint="~/windowshare" options="sec=krb5,cruid=%(USERUID),file_mode=0700,dir_mode=0700,nodev,nosuid" />

Answer 3

pmount allows users to mount filesystems without root access or an /etc/fstab entry. It is available in the EPEL repository. I don't think it's a complete solution for you, but it may get you at least part of the way there.