Disclaimer: REALLLLLLY boring topic (but this took me a while to figure out so I hope it helps someone):
Leopard uses a directory in the root called "home." This is different than a user’s home directory, and it has something to do with NFS shares and/or a new “autofs” feature. I’m not going to pretend I know what this does Update: autofs makes using network shares a lot more stable, but it doesn’t really affect me–I’m really just a designer/developer, and don’t get into the inner-works of the OS much.
What I do know is that I don’t want it using that "/home" directory because in one of my development projects I had used that directory to store a website. Now that Leopard has been installed, I can’t write to that directory, and I need to to avoid changing up my development project.
Long story short: To fix this “problem,” you can edit the "auto_master" file in your /etc directory.
Change the line
/home auto_home -nobrowse
to
/your/directory/here auto_home -nobrowse
Reboot and you will have reclaimed your /home directory.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:54 am
Thanks for the information. I had a similar problem with “/home” in Leopard. I use a soft link called “home” pointing to my mac development directory, so I can reproduce the “/home/ftpuser/sitename.com/” directory structure of my DreamHost shared server. I’ll rename that directory to autofs_home. Just one more entry for my “Leopard hacks” documentation.