NFS home dirs and sudo

[King, Daniel]

Is this more a question of the 'format' command than sudo?

What does format do, as root, in the same directory?

A. Daniel King, System Analyst
Fiserv - Atlanta Center
1475 Peachtree Street, NE - Suite 700
Atlanta, GA 30309
404-873-2851 x2034

-----Original Message-----
From: "Rudert, Thomas" <Thomas.Rudert at drkw.com>
To: "'sudo-users at sudo.ws'" <sudo-users at sudo.ws>
Subject: NFS home dirs and sudo
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 15:59:28 +0200

Hi there,

I know this question was asked before, but nevertheless this is still an
open issue to me:

we have NFS mounted home dirs and therefore I get the well-known effect that
when I execute the following commmands for instance:

/home/thomas> sudo /usr/sbin/format
Cannot get current directory - Permission denied

/home/thomas> cd /usr
/usr> sudo /usr/sbin/format
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t0d0 <SUN18G cyl 7506 alt 2 hd 19 sec 248>
          /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at 0,0
       1. c0t8d0 <SUN18G cyl 7506 alt 2 hd 19 sec 248>
          /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at 8,0
       2. c0t9d0 <DEC-RZ1CB-CS(C)DEC-0844 cyl 3706 alt 2 hd 20 sec 113>
          /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at 9,0
       3. c0t10d0 <SUN4.2G cyl 3880 alt 2 hd 16 sec 135>
          /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at a,0
       4. c0t11d0 <SUN18G cyl 7506 alt 2 hd 19 sec 248>
          /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at b,0
       5. c0t12d0 <SUN18G cyl 7506 alt 2 hd 19 sec 248>
          /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/sd at c,0
Specify disk (enter its number):

The (not very elegant and it does not make sense at all) workaround is to cd
into a different directory than the user's home dir as part of the initial
login procedure.

Does anybody know about a possibility to execute a super user command
without being forced to leave my own home directory?

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Thomas