Active Directory Home Directories

[jchristiansen]

I am continuing my quest to get AD and OD to play together. My issue now is home directories.

First our setup- AD server running 2003. The Master OD server is OSX 10.4.7, and the replica OD is 10.4.7 as well, although it is not in the equation yet. Home Dirs are stored on the OD master, but not on the boot volume, rather on a drive named StaffHD which is a share named Staff.

The problem– In AD I have defined the home dir as //alpha.hdnet.net/Staff/someusername When I log into the client, the top level home folder is created in the correct location, but is empty, well initially, as soon as you get logged in, it has a library and desktop folder, but no documents. I can get a documents folder created by opening a MS application since it has to create a MUD folder. The problem is that it is not from the user tamplate folder Enligh.lproj on the server. I also tried to use OD to create it by clicking on Create Home Now in WGM, but it did nothing. So I figured I would just use a script to manually create home dirs using createhomedir command. When I did this, it created a folder on the root of the boot volume of the server called staff, and then the home folder in that. I had an idea what was happening, so to test the theory, I changed the path of the home folder in AD to //alpha.hdnet.net/volumes/StaffHD/staff/someusername. I then went to OD and clicked on Create Home Now button, and it worked, creating the home folder from the enligh.lproj template on the server, in the right location. The problem is that when I try to login to the client, it can’t find my home folder since it is not a valid UNC path.

Thoughts???

[arekdreyer]

That’s not supposed to happen, and you shouldn’t have to jump through these hoops, however, I ran into something which sounds really similar.

Previous situation:
I have two home folders servers, each with two external drives for homes. The home folders on home1 were /Volumes/AF/AF and /Volumes/GM/GM. On home2 they were /Volumes/NS/NS and /Volumes/TZ/TZ. (I didn’t want to share out the entire drive, otherwise they could have been just like /Volumes/AF I suppose)

When making these network mounts, the network mount looked like:
/Network/Servers/home1.ssh22.local/Volumes/AF/AF.

I put \home1.ssh22.localVolumesAFAFusername into the SMB Home Direcory field with the AD users and computers tool. The AD plug-in translated this into something wrong, like /Network/Servers/home1.ssh22.local/AF/username (I don’t remember what exactly, but the subfolders were getting stripped out). (I just tested this again with another sample network mount on an external drive, and there was no problem – why was it broken before but not now?)

Steve Burke pointed me to a solution:
I used /etc/fstab to statically mount the drives at the root of the boot volume, rather than relying on automount to mount them in /Volumes, by using /etc/fstab.

Here’s the /etc/fstab of home1:
[code]
UUID=7F72E558-0680-3756-B1F1-64C9A5AA46AC /AF hfs rw 0 0
UUID=17AA3F8B-7183-3133-BA5E-4F3F4878CD5D /GM hfs rw 0 0
[/code]
I used Disk Utility to determine the UUIDs of each drive.

Finally, I created a symbolic link from /HomesAF to /AF/AF, so there are no subdirectories involved, and /Network/Servers/home1.ssh22.local/HomesAF is the format of where home directories live.

[Mad101daN]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: macshome[/u][p]Yeah, network home creation is a server side process that only works on Mac OS X Server. Your best bet is to have the client create it’s home with a login hook if it’s missing on the server.[/p][/QUOTE]

Any idea on how you do this ?

Thx

[Author]

Posts