AD and UIDs

[frijole]

So… for whatever reason, I need to migrate a bunch of users off of an OD server into a larger AD environment. However, I need to keep the formerly-OD server as a fileserver to provide access to the users’ existing home directories. With me so far?

So what we’re looking at is using some tomfoolery to do a NFS union mount of the former network homes over /Users and using the AD plugin’s “Force Local Homes” on all the existing Macs.

So what all this gets us to is how do we ensure consistent UIDs for the AD users on the Mac workstations? My understanding of the standard behavior of the AD plugin is it somewhat randomly generates one, and it might be different across different machines, which is bad. There’s no “uniqueID” that my AD admin knows about to map to the UID, and no decent options to use in its stead…

Ideas?

Thanks in advance,
~ian

[frijole]

MacTroll wrote:

First off… NFS and AD users will probably just result in pain.

Doing the NFS mount into /Users and forcing local homes is the way to go, but I don’t think you’re going to like the fragility of the setup.

The AD plugin generates UIDs from the AD GUID. They are the SAME across machines, but will be different from what you’re currently using.

Unfortunately, AD is the priority, and the NFS /Users was just an idea to try and keep network home folders working. Is there anything in particular that makes the NFS+AD combo unstable? The only way it would be accessed is by AD users on the workstations.

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