Joerg/Others: I want to thank everybody for the suggestions of how to best get the user's $HOME directory information on a zones machine. I was working on this because the JDS QA team filed a bug (bugster 6628566) which suggested gnome-cleanup work this way. They provided a sample script which worked as I described. I wanted to touch base with more experts to get a better idea of how it should work. I think, based on the responses so far, I have some better ideas.
However, in this discussion it is more clear to me that this bug report doesn't seem to have a strong use case. As has been pointed out by several people, a username is not necessary a unique user in different zones, many setups would share the same $HOME directories across zones, etc. Therefore, I am going to ask the bug submitter to further flesh out real use-cases and answer the questions raised in this mail thread before changing gnome-cleanup. Thanks, Brian >> I am trying to modify the gnome-cleanup script (refer to "man >> gnome-cleanup) so it will work in a zones environment. I want to make >> it work so that if you run it as root, you can specify a userid, then it >> will clean away the user's GNOME configuration files in all zones. > > Do you have a specific zone-based setup in mind where this would be > useful? I'd suppose that in most cases multiple zones would either share > home directories or else an identical user name in multiple zones may > refer to different real users. > > I any case separate home directories usually indicate separate > (different) configurations, so I'd expect simultaneous cleanup to be a > rare occasion. > > At first sight a simple -z zone option for gnome-cleanup looks useful > for administrators, but I would think that this should be done via > zlogin. OTOH administrative gnome-cleanup done by user name may not be a > good idea in the first place, because in general local administrators > don't have appropriate access to network based resources. Maybe it would > be a better idea to have a parameter to pass the home directory location > to gnome-cleanup, so admins can determine the configuration to clean up > as appropriate, even if the host/zone the home directory resides on has > a different view of it (and of the user account) than the host/zone from > which the user logs in. > >> [...] I then try to access the user's home >> directory by accessing: >> >> $ZONE_PATH/root/home/userid >> >> However, this directory doesn't exist because the real user's >> home directory is $ZONE_PATH/root/export/home/userid. > > That is a very specific setup. > >> It seems >> that this gets mapped to $ZONE_PATH/root/home/userid by >> /etc/auto_home. >> >> Is there any way (short of parsing the /etc/auto_home file >> directly) > > That surely wouldn't work. You may have automounter maps from a remote > name service involved (which may in turn be configured per-zone). You > may have executable automounter maps. You can encounter networked > resources you should leave alone (or can't get to) anywhere in the > resolution. > >> to figure out what the user's $HOME directory really >> is when the mounts are not yet setup? Or is there a way to >> cause the mounts to get set up so that the >> $ZONE_PATH/root/home/userid directory will exist? Or is there >> a better way to achieve what I am trying to do? >> > > I'm not sure you want to achieve the right thing. > > - Joerg >
