AD mobile account with local home directory

Question

AD mobile account with local home directory

I basically have the same question as this post:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=696367

I have set up Tiger workstations to authenticate to AD, I am forcing a local home dir. Everything works great. I want to do the same thing for Tiger laptop users with mobile accounts. The problem is that OS X creates a second home directory outside of /Users based on attributes from my AD schema. Just like with the non-mobile users, I want to ignore all home dir attributes from AD and just use the user's home dir that is in /Users. So the question is, how can you use a mobile account and force a local home dir with Apple's AD plugin??????

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Jul 7, 2006 1:13 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Omino

Level 3

595 points

Sep 25, 2006 1:11 PM in response to Patrick Birke

In the AD plugin, check the box for Create mobile account at login. The force local home directory on stratup disk should then be greyed out and checked. Uncheck Use UNC path from Active Directory... Alternately, you can go into AD Users and Computers and simply remove their network home directory.

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 25, 2006 1:54 PM in response to Omino

Yes, I know how to click buttons in the gui, that does not fix the issue. The issue is that the Active Directory schema at my company includes extended attributes from the RFC 2307 schema. Apple's AD plugin does not know how to handle this extended schema especially when using mobile accounts.

Apple's AD plugin reads these unix attributes from AD and thinks it knows what to do but ends up causing more problems then if there were no unix attributes at all.

Since this post, I have opened a ticket with Apple. They were able to recreate the problem in their lab with their AD server. The only work around is to create a custom ActiveDirectory.plist file that forces the Mac to ignore what AD is telling it.

This solution works unless the ActiveDirectory.plist file is deleted or corrupted. This problem will only become worse once Microsoft includes all of the RFC 2307 schema in their next service pack of Win 2003 server.

Reply