Lion Clients Won't Mount Network Home?

Wow, nice to FINALLY hear that someone else out there has the same issue.

Unfortunately, I have some bad news. I ended up working with Apple Enterprise Support on this issue for the better part of 3 weeks. I was preparing images for a large scale deployment and we had to make the call to go Snow Leopard before we were able to work things out.

In the end, after MANY emails, screenshots, and configs sent back and forth to this enterprise support technician I was working with, I was ultimately told they couldn't reproduce my issue "in the lab," so for continued work with this problem I was going to have to open an official case with Enterprise Engineering and work directly with them, however this had/has a HUGE price tag per incident. By this point, I had already made the call that our deployment would go SL for now, and to our dismay, I'll have to migrate people to Lion once we can make it work.

I've run all the Lion updates, have 10.7.1, nothing. No matter what, if I have Mount Network Home checked in WGM, the user gets prompted with a "select this share" window, and regardless, it still never mounts the real network home. I even tried making a new 10.7 server and seeing if that would work, but that was actually a disaster attempting to upgrade our config from 10.6 (and... in the end, it didn't work either). It shouldn't matter though as I was told by Enterprise Support that 10.7 clients should work "just fine" with 10.6 server. Again, in the end, nothing has made Lion work so far in our environment.

What version of Windows Server are you running? Since there seems to be so few people having this issue, I'm afraid it has something to do with Server 2003 which we are still running. Apple claims it's still supported (and it's working great with SL), but regardless, our "golden triangle" setup still doesn't work properly with Lion.

If you get anywhere, or anyone else out there has any ideas, please feel free to chime in. MANY hours have already been spent on this issue I'm dreading tackling this one when the time finally comes to make Lion really work.

~S

Yeah, I feel like it should be a more common issue, but like you said to me, you are the first person "out there" I've found with this problem (which worries me).

We have a rather substantial managed (OD/AD) Mac setup here and I have had relatively few issues the last 2 years with Snow Leopard and our OD (10.6 server) and AD (Win 2k3) servers and client integration/management. I started Lion testing as soon as it was available, and honestly, everything else (WGM wise) worked fine, but the network homes (and in-turn this login selection screen thing) were a mess. Use of our network drives was too crucial to press forward with out them auto-mounting.

I too fear the same fate that since they "haven't seen it" and "couldn't reproduce it" it's not going to just dissapear with 10.7.2, although I hear buzz that that will be a rather substantial update. If you (or anyone out there) finds anything please do share.

~S

Well neoseele, that is pretty much exactly what I see, and that is very similar to our setup. We too use DeployStudio to deploy all the images, so there's another common thread. It's interesting that it's now confirmed that it can happen with Server 2k8 and 2k3 (as you've mentioned you're on 2k8). I have also done the exact same experiment with unhidden homes, and know the exact scenario you are describing. I feel then it is something in the way Lion is calling the drives.

I also hear you on the new hardware... While we aren't running any Airs, we just installed a bunch of new Mini's in a whole bunch of classrooms here. There was some promising info about people putting 10.6.8 on the new Apple Mini's (downgrading from Lion), but when I experimented with it (and succeeded), it just totally sucked to be frank. Really slow, buggy, and had some really weird quirks. In the end, even though as you may have read, I went with SL for our mass deployment this summer, I have been forced in this past week actually to make Lion work.

While I haven't made the exact issue of this thread work (again, welcome anyone's suggestions on real network homes), I did come up with a clunky but functional workaround (since we were forced to make Lion work... now). I noticed that if you mounted a SMB share via the "Items" in "Login" under WGM, it would work fine (none of this "select a volume" junk at login). Now, this has to be a static path, it cannot pull/generate a direct path to an individual user's network home, however, I "went up the tree" to the closest static path that contained the users network homes. In other words, by creating a share, that has ALL the hidden shares in in, you can mount that one share. THEN, if your permissions are correct, it is setup so they login to lion, this one static SMB share is mounted, and when they open it, there is one folder (that the users can see) that is their network home. Now, there are some side effects, for example, if your permissions are not correct, someone could view or access someone else's network home (again, cannot emphasize proper permissions using this method, I had to do a lot of auditing to make sure things were more-or-less secure). Or, if you are an administrator and you log in, you see everyone's network home, since you have permission to. So, like I said, clunky, but, our users can access their network homes on Lion now.

Let me know if you want any other details, it can be hard to describe well someone's exact setup. Glad to hear there are more out there with this issue. It is clearly a Lion bug.

Neoseele, it appears we have something different because we have nothing ticked under the AD side of the users. So you are saying if you go to AD/All Domains, and set preferences at the user level it will attempt to enact those preferences? I guess that makes sense at a user level. My training had me never do any sort of preference setting in AD, instead doing it all with LDAP/OD. So for us, the network homes are mounted at the OD group level.

First, I make an LDAP/OD user group, and add all the AD users and groups I want to it. Then I manage their preferences all via LDAP/OD and never touch anything on the AD side. So, I go to the same place you mentioned (Preferences > Login > Items) but under LDAP, and when I UNcheck the add a network home, I don't get the annoying pop-up "select a volume" at login. This means, to make it work right, I had to completely restructure how network homes were mounted.

I initially had them mounted by OD group, so when an AD user (in an OD group) logged in on a managed mac, it mounted the network home. Now I have it mounting homes by computer group. So, when a user logs into a specific computer, if it has SL, it uses the nice network home feature and looks great. I made a new container for the Lion machines and have that UNchecked, and instead use the method I previously described. This also assumes that you have your computers managed in WGM, and that you have them organized in some way (say, by type, location, etc). It is more work, but it allows us to get very specific with our different macs, labs, locations etc.

You are correct that you have to use it as a URL and NOT a volume... for some reason, but it works.

So, to answer your question about "overriding" the AD, I don't have that because we have no preferences at all on the AD side of things, only LDAP. I went and looked again just now and all the preference settings on AD are just blank/default for me. So, I'm not sure how you would go about unchecking that, but ours are unchecked by default(?).

All that said, again, when we were setting up our whole golden triangle and I was being trained by Apple etc, the methodology was never to touch AD for specifics, but to utilize OD groups, populated with AD users. I am SURE there are many ways to do it though, and mine may not be the best, but it's basically all we/I've known since we started two and half years ago.

I hope some of this helps, but, let me know if I can clarify more.

~S