It is most definitely possible, but it’s not really something that’s publicly documented by Apple.

What you can do is manage the ‘Synchronisation URL’ setting in the mobile account MCX for a given workgroup. From the description:

[quote]URL of the network home used for home sync. Only setable for mobile account creation. The string “%@” will be substituted with the user record name before use. Example: afp://myserver.apple.com/Users/BuildingA/%@ .[/quote]

I have a setup so that:

 AD users can log in to the Macs with their normal everyday username and password and have a homedir located live to the mac server (using augmented records, as described here http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:1cpVgeTTKs0J:developer.apple.com/releasenotes/MacOSXServer/RN-DirectoryServicesSession549/index.html+extending+directory+services&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari – God bless ’em, they’ve broken the link)
 If users want to use iMovie or FCE, they log in with their ‘movie’ username assigned to them/their group. This user account is also in AD, but it is in a OD workgroup that has its Synchronisation URL set, so that the homedir sync up and down to/from the xserve in order to make video apps play nicely.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Stu

no, you wouldn’t even need to do that. Sorry, perhaps my explanation wasn’t clear. For your setup you would edit the synchronisation URL on a machine group basis, meaning that all users logging in to a Mac in that list had their sync URL settings applied to them so that their home dir effectively lives on the Mac server. The users record on the AD is not touched at all – the AD doesn’t know that the user’s home is on a Mac server, that’s down to the Mac client and OS X Server.

the only real thing you need to decide is whether or not you want mobile accounts with synchronisation (users almost always sit at the same machines and they are hard-wired) or live network homes to the Mac server (users move around a lot, you have laptops running wirelessly). The other benefit of synchronised homes is that things like Adobe CS and M$ stuff plays better compared to them being run from a ‘live’ network home directory, as to the running application the home directory is a local one.

The former is where Synchronisation URL comes into play, the latter is simply a case of augmenting the users’ AD record with an OD one providing certain bits of info for the client (Home directory location being the obvious one).

Stu