Larry,

Is selinux turned on?  Are there any messages in 
/var/log/audit/audit.log concerning these home areas.

How did you add the user?  Did you do it by hand or did you use adduser or 
via some other method?

-Connie Sieh

On Wed, 13 Jan 2010, 
Larry Linder wrote:

> There is a problem with installing new users in a directory other than /home
> Most of us work from our home directory some use a meg and some use many G.
>
> In our scheme to isolate users from OS's we have a number of large disk set up
> as  engr1, engr2, engrnn.   A number of users have their login directory in
> something other than /home.
>
> Red Hat some how got this messed up.
>
> If you install it, login as root, make a new user account that is like the old
> account.   /engr10/users/llinder.  you will not be able to login as linder.
> Not only that if you use the new user GUI and remove a user it will remove the
> users directory that it couldn't find for a login !!!!
>
> The message you get is totally bogus.
>
> " Your home directory is listed as
> '/engr/users/llinder'
> but it does not appear to exist.  Do you want to
> login with /root directory?
> It unlikely anything will work . . .
> unless you use a failsafe
> 					no 	yes
>
> "
> To prove the point I added a new user "bogus" and it a / home/bogus  directory
> was created.  Interesting because there was never a /home directory set up
> during an install.  So where is this magic /home directory.
>
> It looks like to use SL you have to assign a Tera byte drives to /home and let
> the garbage pile up, Without much hope of doing an intelligent back up
>
> What we are planning to do till we can get this sorted out is to install Open
> Suse 9.3   as 10.3  screwed up with LVM trash.
>
> Larry Linder
>