Dealing with Windows user homedir [PSARC/2008/441 nss_ad]

[Nicolas Williams]

An issue has come up.  The spec for this case said that getpw*() for
Windows users would for the time being return an SMB URL in the home
directory field.  This is quite clearly incorrect since SMB URLs
contain a colon, the separator character for passwd(4)[*].

We could use a /net/<server>/<share>/<path> scheme, but this won't work
unless the server also speaks NFS, as the -hosts automount map does not
yet support negotiation of CIFS vs. NFS -- it only supports NFS.

And it's entirely possible that in the future the automounter may get a
new -hosts-like map for CIFS that is distinct from the existing -hosts
map.

There has been a small amount of discussion about this, but it's been
inconclusive.  Currently there are no plans to either enhance the
existing -hosts map nor to introduce a new one that is specific to CIFS.

What to do?

I propose that we use /net/<server>/... simply because: a) it can be
made to work with multi-protocol file servers, b) we can always change
it later (perhaps by adding a knob) if a CIFS-specific -hosts-like map
is added.

Alternatively, we could simply not return a home directory value at all.

Nico


[*] Incidentally, the file format is used internally in the name service
    switch / backend protocol.