[PC-BSD Support] disappering symlinks

[USM Bish]

cynique wrote:
 >
[ some snipped ]
 >
 > 1st issue
 > ---------
 > after  some  twiddling   (installing,  ifconfig  up/down)  i
 > couldn't  login  as a  normal  user  (via  ssh and  even  on
 > console).  only  root  worked.  i  figured  out  that  ~home
 > symbolic  link (to  /usr/home)  disappeared and  /etc/passwd
 > entries were  pointing to  nowhere. thus  no login.  after i
 > setup back  the symbolic  link everything works  fine. after
 > this i rewrote /etc/passwd to  point to /usr/home instead of
 > /home.
 >

I am also a relative newcomer to PC-BSD, and no authority, but
these sumlinks to  /home and /Programs are by  default, set at
initial installation.  I do not  run on  a server, just  on my
laptop, but  with recurrent boots  and much shorter  uptime, I
have faced no such issue. My /etc/passwd works on the symlinks
stated without any issues:

[bish at pcbsd ~]$ ls -al /home
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  8 Mar 14 17:11 /home -> /usr/home
[bish at pcbsd ~]$ ls -al /Programs
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  13 Dec  5 19:37 /Programs -> /usr/Programs
[bish at pcbsd ~]$ cat /etc/passwd | grep bish
bish:*:1001:1001:USM Bish:/home/bish:/usr/local/bin/bash
[bish at pcbsd ~]$

 >
[ some more snipped ]
 >
 > so  my question  is: does  anyone please  have any  idea why
 > those symlinks are disappearing?
 >

If they are disappearing after reboot, then there must be some
'rm' somewhere  in the  boot processes  within /etc  or during
startup of  /PCBSD scripts, which  has come in  with something
that has  been installed  later. This should  not happen  on a
running system !

Just a guess ...

Bish