Why can’t I write to /home (Solaris x86 10) Solaris 2 FAQ Question 3.4
Having not played with SunOS (Solaris) for a long time, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to once agian refresh my skills with it. But I had forgotten this little gem:
SunOS 5.x is delivered with the "automounter" enabled. The automounter is designed for NFS sites, to simplify maintenance of the list of filesystems that need mounting. However it is a burden for standalone sites.
The automounter takes over /home and in effect becomes the NFS server for it, so it no longer behaves like a normal directory. This is normally a Good Thing as it simplifies administration if everybody's home directory is /home/
If you want to continue to use the automounter, edit /etc/auto_master and comment out the line starting with "/home". Then run the "automount" command which will cause automountd to reload the maps.
With that out of the way I was free to write to /home once again.
(the way to restart sshd was a bit freaky as well – svcadm -v restart ssh )