AD Plugin only creates homes dirs on Macintosh HD not specfied sharepoint

[sheridanp]

Hi Guys,

I have been working prototyping some AD-OD integration, I’ve scoured the web and read the guides, especially Corey’s AD-OD Sandbox guide. Everything went swimmingly, I setup the home directories on both windows and osx servers and I was pretty pleased with the results. So I decided to push the limits abit.

Corey’s guide tells use to create the home directories for both windows and mac clients on the osxserver on the Macintosh HD/homes. That all worked, so I decided to change it alittle and redirect the sharepoint to a second volume ODDATA/homes, but before I did that I tore down the previous sharepoint, making sure I removed the tick in automount, saved and then unshared the original share on Macintosh HD/ I also deleted the directory.

I then decided to try and login in as a active directory user so what would happen,

Authenticated aokay, begun login process
Pause, then managed prefs come across for the account (ie. dock on the left)
Then message pops up saying unable to find home dir.
Dock home point is ?

I investigate, find there is no home folder for the user on my specified share ODDATA/homes but when I check Macintosh HD/ I found a homes/helloworld home folder on Macintosh HD created and inside that the all directories appropriate profile directories created.

I spend several hours trying different things, destroying sharepoints, updating AD home path (\\leopard\homes\helloworld), remaking them, checking .. etc. and what I have found is that if the sharepoint is created on Macintosh/ everything works greats, as long as I update the AD path in AD and make the share a automount.

But if you try and place the homedir on a second volume ie ODDATA, it fails, I decided to create some Open Directory users and specify their home dirs on a second volume share, wouldn’t you know it, works perfectly. It’s like the AD plugin is hardcoded only to make folders on / of the systems boot volume.

What have I done wrong, what have I missed, it cannot be so, I have searched everywhere online and other than trying to create augment records as specified by MikeB I am stuck….. .. is that the way to go.

Hoping for your feedback.

Sherdian

[sheridanp]

After much pain and suffering,

I fluked it (after being inspired by mike bombich and his comment about specifying the full path for home dirs), I made a symbolic link on the Macintosh HD volume pointing to the second volume carrying the data. Something along the lines of

ln -s /Volumes/ODDATA/studdata studdata

When a user logins in the AD plugin reads the path from AD ie. \\odmaster\studdata\%username%, then goes to read the path \studdata\%username%, goes to check the files on the system, finds the studdata symbolic link on / follows, the redirect to /Volumes/ODDATA/studdata then uses that folder as the base directory….

Is that how its meant to work, am I doing it the write way, I have tried it several times on my prototype lab, and I have even started rolling out users in the production environment, I’ve done about 120, so far so good..

Am I doing it right, any feedback, anything to watch out for.

[sheridanp]

So guys…

Is the method I am using … at all approved, has anybody got it working any differently?

[sheridanp]

Thanks for the reply, macshome

With this (symlink), rsync and passenger batch file permission setter I feel there is is nothing I can’t do in regards to mac home directories, even if the permissions are are stuffed on the homedirs I was able to rebuild.. well lets say reassign them correctly (thanks passenger) and using rysnc I merged the old work that was unable to be restored into the new user home dirs where users where already creating new documents. This allowed them to be able to keep their new stuff they just created in their new home dirs plus their old stuff which was assigned permissions of the old OD setup (barring any files that had the same name of course).

I feel my confidence increasing the more time I spend with the os, and coming from a windows background, that’s saying something.

PS And those Guides, AD-OD sandbox, bombichs leverage AD guide and the leopard quickstart guide (found on afp548) where the crux of it all.

I know I have a long way to go…

And once again .. thanks

[Author]

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