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mattdwen
Asked: 2010-07-15 20:03:02 +0800 CST

OSX clients on Active Directory mounting wrong Home path

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I am adding an OSX Open Directory server to a Windows 2008 Domain. I've got OSX clients authentication properly against AD and getting the settings from OD.

In AD, the users profiles are set to connect a Home folder to a network path, e.g. Z:\ to \\server\share\username

When logging into OSX, this gets mounted as \\server\share.

I've played with the advanced settings under AD binding on OSX, but they all seem to be related to using the network path as the OSX Home folder, which is not what I want.

What do I need to do to get this mounting directly to \\server\share\username when logging into OSX?

mac-osx active-directory

2 Answers

  1. I know nothing about OS X, but the behavior you're describing sounds just like the behavior of the old Windows 9X OS's. To get properly "mapped" home directories on those old beasts the user's home directory had to be the share point (because a \server\share\user UNC would map the root of the drive letter to \server\share). We ended up sharing each user home directory individually. It would work for what you want, but it's certainly not preferred. I can tell you that 2004-era W2K3 Server machines could handle hosting 2,500+ shared folders with no I'll effects...

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  2. The problem is that OSX will only mount the share point as a volume starting at some version (10.10 or so). Your share point is \\server\share, so that is what is being mounted as a volume.

    If you look in the dock on the client machine, you will see a folder icon. This folder icon will open the user's folder (\\server\share\user) as you desire. If you want the user's folder to be auto-mounted as a volume, you can use one of the following workarounds.

    • Create a script that mounts the user home directories instead of using the built-in OSX AD plugin.
    • Create a sharepoint for every user in your domain (seems like a bad idea to me), instead of using the single share point with subfolders as you are doing now.
    • Teach your users to use the folder icon in the dock instead of the hard drive icon on the desktop
    • Manually connect to the folder using Finder > Go > Connect to Server..., manually type in the uri for the folder (example: smb://server/share/user) and then enter link description herethe user's Startup Items

    This article provides in-depth details.

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