High Sierra & network accounts

[iSteve]

Hello,

 

We are moving from El Capitan and Workgroup Manager to High Sierra and Profile Manager this summer. All is going well, except on testing, when a network user logs in, their account is glacially slow with the spinning beachball appearing whenever they attempt to do anything.

 

I expect this is due to certain folders needing redirecting to a local volume, rather than the network, in High Sierra. Does anyone have any tips for best practise on this?

 

Previously we were redirecting the ~/Library/Application Support /Adobe folder to /tmp, as well as ~/Library/Caches but I suspect these paths have changed in HS.

 

At the moment, we have nice machines with SSDs which boot in seconds, but then as soon as a user logs in they become unusable.

 

Any advice welcome

[dhicks]

I expect this is due to certain folders needing redirecting to a local volume, rather than the network, in High Sierra.

 

That would be my guess, too - I've just got our ICT room configured with Mojave managed by an MDM (Zuludesk), and for that we've gone with local-only accounts and redirected user's Documents folders to a locally cached version of their Google Drive folder. Performance is fine in testing, I guess I'll see what happens when we have children using it in a couple of weeks.

 

You could do similar - have local accounts and only redirect the folders you think you need to (~/Documents, maybe ~/Desktop, maybe some select settings folders)?

[iSteve]

Thanks for your reply.

 

I had another look at things. Seems that the syntax as part of MCXRedirector differs from our 10.9 plists to High Sierra. I corrected this, managing to get ~/Caches to redirect. I then tried to redirect ~/Library to the /tmp folder. So far so good - the machine is snappy, and home folders still reside on the network. Just means all the personal settings, which kids don't really need, are kept off the network. This also makes the pain of administrative password resets breaking Keychain go away!

 

Have also implemented a logout redirection to delete their trash on exit.