Difference between “/export/home” and “/home”

The idea was/is that /export/home is for a physical locally stored home directory. The word 'export' is from the idea that this home directory could be exported to be used from other hosts as well.

/home on the other hand would the logical mount for your home directory. You should never physically create home directories in /home. It is a place for mounts.

Suppose I have an account on 5 different Solaris hosts. Surely I would like to have only one physical home directory across all those hosts. If the automounter is correctly configured then I would on all 5 hosts see my home directory in /home but that is really just a logical mirror. There would probably be one of the 5 hosts that would hold my physical home directory and on that particular host I would also see my home directory in /export/home.

If your home directory is always locally stored on the machine then you'll always see /export/home.

Too few sites actually centralize home directories in my opinion. But Sun's idea was to use a layout that made such sharing easy and consistent from one host to another. Rarely used and this is the reason that people wonder what it was for.

(Footnote: It was actually only recently, with Solaris 11, that this was made fully consistent so that a user can always see his home directory in /home no matter if the home directory is locally stored in /export/home. This change will make it easier for people from the Linux camp to understand)

As Noufal Ibrahim says, I think this is a Solaris convention.

IIRC, /export/home is used on the server where the actual files live, and /home is where the other servers mount it.

What does mount | grep home say? I'm guessing that /export/home has a file system type of UFS, and /home has a type of NFS?

/etc/fstab may also have some clues.

I've seen the /export/home layout on old Solaris machines that I've used and it was a convention indicating that the partition was exported via. NFS. This is not something that's listed in the FHS so I don't know how "standard" it is really.