Mapping AD Home Directory to Finder at logon.

[Sam_Brown]

Hey Guys.

 

I have ZERO experience with Macs so bare with my terminology here. Some of it is definitely going to be flaky. I'm trying to help out a colleague here with a problem we're having with our new Mac Suite.

 

Current Setup

===========

* Macs joined to the domain running Mavericks.

* Home Areas on Server 2008r2 file server.

* Domain running @ 2008r2 Functional Level.

* Users log into Macs using their AD credentials.

 

What is a nice easy way to add a link to a Students Home Area (on windows Server 2008r2) in the Finder side bar under Favourites? Can we grab this info from the Home Folder field in AD? Believe we can script it at logon using the DSCL command and the AD Plug In but all the documentation on it is pretty hard going to work out exactly what we need to do to get it working.

 

At the moment we have a shortcut in the dock however when in applications when they try and save this doesn't give us much help as they can't save to it! They have to save to desktop them copy to the shortcut in the dock which isn't ideal.

 

If anyone has any experience with this it would be very well received!

[themightymrp]

I haven't tried it with Mavericks (because our Macs are too old), but this method is how I did it on Snow Leopard:

 

Mac OS X 10.6 Server Admin: Setting Up Home Folders for Active Directory User Accounts

[Quackers]

So long as 'Force local home folder on startup disk' and 'Create mobile account at login' is not ticked when you join them to AD it will map the Documents, Desktop , Pictures etc to the users Home Folder on the server, as long as its called 'Documents' on the server and not My Documents. So to the user they just open finder and click Documents on the left and all their documents are available.

[Sam_Brown]

as long as its called 'Documents' on the server and not My Documents. So to the user they just open finder and click Documents on the left and all their documents are available.

 

Hi,

 

Could you elaborate on this please? At the moment our student home areas are just named after their username so for example a user with the name "student" would have a home area in a folder called "student"

[Quackers]

Hi,

 

Could you elaborate on this please? At the moment our student home areas are just named after their username so for example a user with the name "student" would have a home area in a folder called "student"

 

We have the Home Directory for the user set in AD, to say \\server\homes\%username%

 

Then on the Windows side we use Group Policy Folder Redirection to map the folders up

 

So 'My Documents' goes to

 

\\server\homes\%username%\Documents

 

Desktop goes to

 

\\server\homes\%username%\Desktop

 

and so on.

 

When the user logs onto the Mac it auto maps the Documents to \\server\homes\%username%\Documents so long as those options in the previous post are not ticked.

[Sam_Brown]

I assume that's Win7? Will give this a test tomorrow and see how we get on. Thanks for the tip.

[Quackers]

Yes, the Mac will look for a folder called 'Documents' in the home directory. If it aint there it will make one and all the Mac documents will be put in there by default. So if you point Windows to the same place the users get a consistent Documents across the platforms.

[Jasbo]

What do you do with the users mac library folder? Does that just live In The ad home folder to? Thanks

[Quackers]

What do you do with the users mac library folder? Does that just live In The ad home folder to? Thanks

 

Yep we leave that in there too. Users don't really go to there mapped home drive when on Windows they tend to go directly to Documents so they don't really see the folder and if they did I'm sure they would just ignore it.

[Squelch]

So long as 'Force local home folder on startup disk' and 'Create mobile account at login' is not ticked when you join them to AD it will map the Documents, Desktop , Pictures etc to the users Home Folder on the server, as long as its called 'Documents' on the server and not My Documents. So to the user they just open finder and click Documents on the left and all their documents are available.

 

Another Mac newbie here, I've just followed your instructions and it does work but the mac takes a big performance hit. Is this normal? Our wifi is not managed yet so I'm guessing it's the bottleneck.

[furby]

Could be, if you alt+click on the wifi icon in the menu bar you can see the strength on the connection. Also, spotlight indexes files when they log on so could be that but seems surprising it would make much of a difference. Edited March 19, 2014 by furby