thanks to all who replied (there were many of you), all basically saying 
that i should unmount home directories and check the permissions on 
/home... it doesn't matter now anyway - we got a new hard disk and 
solaris 2.6, and after many hours of seemingly fruitless config-fiddling, 
our solution was "let's just reboot everything"... which worked... the 
problem has gone away (as someone suggested, it was probably related to a 
minor nis+ problem which only got fixed yesterday, right before the 
reboot...)
Billy Constantine
Computer Science student / SMUG Systems Administrator
University of Adelaide, South Australia
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:03 CDT