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PAM: Install pam_mkhomedir for Automatic User Home Directory Creation

Introduction

You may be in a situation like mine where you have your Solaris connected to an LDAP server or similar, and you're facing the problem of automatic home directory creation for users who connect. After 2-3 hours of struggles, I finally managed to compile and configure everything.

Here's my documentation to save time for others who might face the same issue.

Prerequisites

First, you'll need a small package to avoid errors like this:

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ld: fatal: file values-Xa.o: open failed: No such file or directory

To avoid this problem, install the SUNWarc package:

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pkgadd -d . /cdrom/cdrom0/Solaris_10/Product/SUNWarc

You'll also need to install gcc:

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pkg-get install gcc4core gcc4g++

Then, we'll add these to our path:

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export PATH=$PATH:/opt/csw/gcc4/bin
export CC=gcc

Compilation

Now we can proceed with the compilation.

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wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/pre/library/Linux-PAM-0.81.tar.bz2
./configure
cp _pam_aconf.h libpam/include/security
cd modules/pammodutil
gcc -c -O2 -D_REENTRANT -DPAM_DYNAMIC -Wall -fPIC -I../../libpam/include -I../../libpamc/include -Iinclude modutil_cleanup.c
gcc -c -O2 -D_REENTRANT -DPAM_DYNAMIC -Wall -fPIC -I../../libpam/include -I../../libpamc/include -Iinclude modutil_ioloop.c
gcc -c -O2 -D_REENTRANT -DPAM_DYNAMIC -Wall -fPIC -I../../libpam/include -I../../libpamc/include -Iinclude modutil_getpwnam.c -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS
cd ../pam_mkhomedir
gcc -c -O2 -D_REENTRANT -DPAM_DYNAMIC -Wall -fPIC -I../../libpam/include -I../../libpamc/include -I../pammodutil/include pam_mkhomedir.c
/usr/ccs/bin/ld -o pam_mkhomedir.so -B dynamic -G -lc pam_mkhomedir.o ../pammodutil/modutil_*.o

Installation

Installation is quite simple. Still in the source directory, execute:

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cp pam_mkhomedir.so /usr/lib/security/pam_mkhomedir.so.1
cd /usr/lib/security
ln -s pam_mkhomedir.so.1 pam_mkhomedir.so
chown root:bin pam_mkhomedir.so.1

That's it! :-)

Configuration

For configuration, we'll simply edit pam.conf and add this line:

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...
# Default definition for Session management
# Used when service name is not explicitly mentioned for session management
#
other   session required        pam_unix_session.so.1
other   session required        pam_mkhomedir.so.1 skel=/etc/skel/ umask=0022
...

You can now log in and you'll get this message on the first login of a user:

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Creating directory '/home/pmavro'.

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