Fix "no home directory" issue when first time logging in

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1

Hi, we try to ease user’s onboarding to HPC using OnDemand interface. On our site (with OOD 1.6 I think) we have a problem: if this is the very first time a new user logs on to our system, then the home directory has not yet been made in /home/$USER . Then the OOD login failed with error message “Missing home directory” or something like that. Right now we can work around this by ssh-ing first into the login node so that the home directory is created. Then login via OnDemand will work as usual.

My question is: has there been workaround so we can get the home directory created on the first login? Home directory creation is a privileged operation so I am not sure if this doable. Any suggestion would be appreeciated.

Wirawan

2

There have been several others with this issue which resulted in some changes and this documentation: https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/master/customization.html#custom-error-page-for-missing-home-directory-on-launch

A future release of OnDemand will include a pre_run_hook type config in nginx_stage that would allow you to run a command before the PUN is launched so you could use that to bootstrap the home directory: https://github.com/OSC/ondemand/pull/535