Moving Homedirs, 10.4.2

[Flash]

The 10.4.2 update supposedly contains some “enhancements” allowing for easier homedir relocation. I had hoped, in a perfect world, that a button would just appear in WGM entitled “move homedir now”. No such luck, so I’m sharing my manual method below. If someone has found such a button in 10.4.2, or sees any obvious problem with my manual method, please share.

Read the man pages and test first!

1. ditto -rsrc source_dir destination_dir
2. Then use WGM to make the ldap change. You could certainly use some other ldap tool, but WGM can do many at once without screwing up each user’s path.
3. Here’s the catch; at least in my setup, using managed clients, each user’s Sidebar.plist will now have incorrect paths to Docs, Pics, Music, etc. My blunt solution was simply to find for all Sidebar.plist files, then purge those puppies. When users log in, fresh Sidebar.plist files are generated with whatever managed prefs are configured and no one is the wiser. Obviously any previous customization to the sidebar is lost, but hey, they’re only users. Just kidding!

[stevek]

[QUOTE BY= Flash]
1. ditto -rsrc source_dir destination_dir
2. Then use WGM to make the ldap change. You could certainly use some other ldap tool, but WGM can do many at once without screwing up each user’s path.
[/QUOTE]

I think you need to swap step 1 and 2.. when I did it this way I could not mount the home directory… As per the apple documentation you need to create the new directory with WGM before moving the data, of cores I didn’t read that until I moved the data, and had to delete it and move it again.

[Author]

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