Ldap – How to autocreate home directories in automounted NFS directory

I don't know if you mean the CIFS FS will be served from linux or just mounted under linux on the clients.

However many non linux cifs implementations do not support stuff like symlinks and unix sockets so most window managers will die with a non linux cifs home dir.

Auth is no problem you can just use winbindd and you can as you say use pam_mount to actually mount the dirs on loging.

We have 6 labs of about 250 linux/windows dual boots. Their home dirs are mounted from a linux cifs share using AD logon scripts for windows and pam_mount and winbind under linux.

On Ubuntu 10.04, both autofs and GDM are Upstart (/etc/init) jobs, which means that they can potentially run in parallel.

However, since neither has an explicit dependency on the other, there is nothing enforcing that GDM starts after autofs, so there is a race condition between the two.

The best way to solve this is to reconfigure GDM to only start once autofs has started. To do this, edit /etc/init/gdm.conf, and change the start on block. Where it originally reads,

start on (filesystem
          and started dbus
          and (graphics-device-added fb0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
               or drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
               or stopped udevtrigger))

add an additional clause so that it reads

start on (filesystem
          and started dbus
          and (graphics-device-added fb0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
               or drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
               or stopped udevtrigger)
          and started autofs)