Changing users home directory in CC3 to a SAN on a mac server!

[reggiep]

Hi All,

We had a mac suite, complete with Xserve and a 4TB SAN attached, over the summer and nobody quite knows what to do with it.

BUT I have an idea!

That lovely big SAN, with robotic backup, could house my users home directories as we are running out of space on our CC3 server.

The problem I have is that when I change their home folder in active directory they still get their old folder. When I then do a health check from the management folder CC3 puts their old folder back as their home folder!

 

Am I missing something or does CC3 not like this?

 

Thanks:D

[webman]

We had a mac suite, complete with Xserve and a 4TB SAN attached, over the summer and nobody quite knows what to do with it.

 

Why get one if, at the time of purchase, you don't know what to do with it?

[rush_tech]

I'll have it:D

[reggiep]

Why get one if, at the time of purchase, you don't know what to do with it?

 

Do you think it was my idea? I'm only the network manager! SMT liked the idea so we have one.

 

It is sat there looking shiny with nobody knowing what to do with it!

[webman]

Do you think it was my idea? I'm only the network manager! SMT liked the idea so we have one.

 

It is sat there looking shiny with nobody knowing what to do with it!

 

Lol, wonderful! So nice to have such technically-knowledgable SMT! Ask them what they plan to do with it

 

If it's a "proper" SAN you shouldn't have to re-mapping shared folders to it; rather use the SAN connections (iSCSI?), allocating space, and mounting them as drives on the server.

[pete]

Having never touched cc3 (obligatory eeeew), does it see it as a member server providing samba shares? i.e does a net use j: \\xservername\share /user:domain\username /persistent:no map a drive correctly?

 

But yeah - nfs or iscsi would be better, but I've never really poked around with an xserve. Use it for ESXi?

 

Just a hint, if you're questioning your smt's ability to ability to organise a vertical urination in a brewery, you may want to nix that url in your sig.

[Michael]

You'll need to specify the home directories within the RMMC. Although you're right that AD is running in the background, I wouldn't recommend you make changes from here.

 

When bulk creating users on RM CC3 (using a CSV file) you can specify the home drive and also the profile path, which you could also move.

 

I would recommend you keep the same directory structure, so all you need to change is the servername.

[Diello]

Seem to think CC3 must have it's home directories on a CC3 server... could be wrong, just seem to remember reading it somewhere!

[CyberNerd]

We have a similar-ish setup.

In the summer we got an IBM fibre channel SAN that is connected to linux servers (pretty similar to your mac server from a file-serving point of view). We setup samba so that shares are created as soon as the user logs in. We then just pointed the students homedrive in AD - users and computers to 'map' H: to \\newserver\username

as soon as the user connects s/he gets a homedrive with emailed quota's, veto'd files, recycle-bin. I posted the samba config here:http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23354-quota-managment.html#post226651

 

btw check this out:

 

 hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads:  834 MB in  3.00 seconds = 277.99 MB/sec

/showoff

of course, we're using this for virtualisation too, not just a fileserver.

[spc-rocket]

We have a similar-ish setup.

In the summer we got an IBM fibre channel SAN that is connected to linux servers (pretty similar to your mac server from a file-serving point of view). We setup samba so that shares are created as soon as the user logs in. We then just pointed the students homedrive in AD - users and computers to 'map' H: to \\newserver\username

as soon as the user connects s/he gets a homedrive with emailed quota's, veto'd files, recycle-bin. I posted the samba config here:http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23354-quota-managment.html#post226651

 

btw check this out:

 

 hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads:  834 MB in  3.00 seconds = 277.99 MB/sec

/showoff

of course, we're using this for virtualisation too, not just a fileserver.

 

I don't know i still can't justify FC for schools use, i think iscsi aggregated connections is more than enough.

 

Ash.

[CyberNerd]

I don't know i still can't justify FC for schools use, i think iscsi aggregated connections is more than enough.

 

Ash.

 

spend less on MS licensing and you'll be able to justify it.

[DMcCoy]

We have a similar-ish setup.

In the summer we got an IBM fibre channel SAN that is connected to linux servers (pretty similar to your mac server from a file-serving point of view). We setup samba so that shares are created as soon as the user logs in. We then just pointed the students homedrive in AD - users and computers to 'map' H: to \\newserver\username

as soon as the user connects s/he gets a homedrive with emailed quota's, veto'd files, recycle-bin. I posted the samba config here:http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23354-quota-managment.html#post226651

 

btw check this out:

 

 hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads:  834 MB in  3.00 seconds = 277.99 MB/sec

/showoff

of course, we're using this for virtualisation too, not just a fileserver.

 

Run iometer on it, with 100% random. Also use something thats bigger than will fit in the san's cache memory.

 

But yes, fibre is good.

 

I have iscsi *and* fibre SANs now

[DMcCoy]

I do hope it's a real san and not a direct attached storage array.

 

OS X cannot be trusted to share files reliably.

[spc-rocket]

spend less on MS licensing and you'll be able to justify it.

 

No need to do that as i said iscsi is enough so don't need to spend it on that, rather spend the cash on more stations/printers etc not neccesarily on MS licensing.

 

Ash.

[reggiep]

Sorry to bring this thread back to life but I never managed to map the users areas to another server via CC3.

In the console the profile location and home directory are non editable. If I edit the folders in active directory/ users and computers it still doesn't work. If however I create a user in active directory and then point that user to a different server and log in on a non CC3 machine on domain it works fine!

 

Any ideas!

 

Thanks

[CyberNerd]

I'm now about half way through migration of our accounts to our new samba server. I use this vbscript to reset the path to the homedirectories.

you should also check and see what adsiedit says about where the path is.

 

set objParent = GetObject("LDAP://OU=year group,DC=example,DC=college,DC=internal")

Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")


objparent.Filter = Array("user")

for each objUser in objParent

   	objUser.put "homedrive", "H:"

  	objuser.HomeDirectory = "\\servername\" & objUser.get("sAMAccountName") 

objuser.Setinfo


next



Wscript.Echo "Done"

[reggiep]

Thanks Cyber nerd BUT..

I'm guessing that you do not have CC3 on your network!

I could well use your script in the future but at the moment even if I did run it CC3 would throw a wobbler as it seems to insist that the users home directory is on a CC3 server!

[CyberNerd]

no it's not CC3, but we keep getting told by RM fanbois that CC3 is simply an extra layer to assist in management and that you can still use MSwindows as it was intended.

see what adsiedit says, maybe just change one and see what happens.

[webman]

Even though CC3 is an additional layer, that additional layer does more magic behind the scenes that helps things work, as well as making the required changes to the MS side of things.

[reggiep]

Even though CC3 is an additional layer, that additional layer does more magic behind the scenes that helps things work, as well as making the required changes to the MS side of things.

 

More like Black Magic.

[DaveCoop]

Same sort of problem here! got a San! got San drives showing on the CC3 servers does RMMC see the users folders? does it boot, any real ideas guys spoke to RM they just said check permissions.

[spc-rocket]

Hi,

 

What you need to do is to backup the drives except the C drive on the server and then attach the san to the CC3 server as as iSCSI and then map a LUN for each drive to the server. Then give the LUN drive a different letter temporarely i.e. X and restore the data from backup to X i.e. if you backed up the D drive restore to X and do for all the other drives except C drive. Then change the drive letter of the X to D and so on and rename the old drivers to other letter than what they are.

 

What this will do is make the drive which is a LUN on SAN appear to the CC3 server as a normal drive that is physically installed on the server except it is not but is on the SAN. This way you don't need to do any AD user pforile or drive mapping it is taken care of it as the drive just appears as a local drive to the CC3 server. This is the same way RM converts their customers to SAN and is what we have done 3 years ago here and its been fine.

 

Ash.

[Butuz]

On CC3 you can only store user home directories on the CC3 domain controllers. Basically they have to appear under the H:\ drive on est-sr-001 or the like.

 

As Ash says you have to present the SAN storage as actual drive letters on your CC3 domain controllers (rather than just editing the active directory home directory path to point to your SAN). So the home directory should always be \\est-sr-001 rather than \\san-name.

 

I don't know if your apple server actually supports this method so can't really help there.

 

Butuz

[CyberDrac]

We've had a similar experience but with more success, we've had users created in our domain and pointed their home folders in AD to another server on another domain on another site with complete success ... I suspect the difference may be down to permissions, I had rights as an admin on both domains and it asked about granting permissions to our domain to the location on the other but once that was done it has worked perfectly well.

http://www.kingdomain.net/CC3HomeFolder.png

Edited August 17, 2010 by CyberDrac

[Theblacksheep]

Seem to think CC3 must have it's home directories on a CC3 server... could be wrong, just seem to remember reading it somewhere!

 

Not from a technical point of view. We moved our CC3 user directories (not profiles) to virtual servers last year. Worked ok, helped us move to vanilla.

 

You do lose things in the MCC and some manual fiddling is required but it worked.