I have no permission to add posts to the wiki or knowledge base so I decided to put it in here.
There is a serious data loss issue that will affect a number of users.
If you have a folder called /home leopard will DELETE all the contents of that folder. No warning, nothing. All the contents of that folder will be wiped out and permanently lost. This is a very common location for unix users to store all kinds of data using /home as the top level directory.
1) it now appears to be an Alias mount point UTI: com.apple.mount-point
2) The mount point is pointing to itself (e.g. /home -> /home )
umount /home doesn’t do anything (just in case it was mounted over the original /home)
OK, so 10.5 is now a “Certified” Unix OS… Sigh. Looking in /etc I find:
auto_home:
#
Automounter map for /home
#
+auto_home # Use directory service
auto_master:
#
Automounter master map
#
+auto_master # Use directory service
/net -hosts -nobrowse,nosuid
/home auto_home -nobrowse
/Network/Servers -fstab
/- -static
If you comment out the /home entry in auto_master and reboot all the files that where in /home are now accessible again. The line should look like this:
#/home auto_home -nobrowse
or if you don’t want to comment it out, just rename it:
/home_auto auto_home -nobrowse
As a Note:
I realize that Apple is very proud of their new Unix certification, but whoever let this one slide should be fired first thing on Monday morning. This is going to break a lot of systems, including many production and development web servers.
To those who use and depend on Time Machine: Although the auto_master “hack” makes the /home folder usable, Time Machine still ignores it completely. I have not found a way to disable this behaviour.