lion AD join with mapped drives

[RabbieBurns]

at the moment we use snow leapord and Admit Mac to bind our Macs to AD. With this we have folder redirection working so their mac desktop is a folder on the student filserver, and there are scripts that mount various network shares.

 

This doesnt seem to work with Lion. Reckon its bugs / problems with Admit Mac, but my question is - is there a way to achieve the above without using a 3rd party software?

 

We have an OSX Server if that makes any difference (at the moment all its used for is netrestore, whcih doesnt even work with the lastest mac probooks)

[ste1988]

I don't know about the shared desktop but you can easily get their shared drives mapped.

 

First of all connect to all the shares from the server.

 

In finder click on go > connect to server > enter the folder you want to mount e.g smb://servername/shared folder.

 

(i normally show my connected servers on the desktop) to do this go to click on finder (top left) and in preferences tick connected servers, this will now show the drive on the desktop.

 

Now open workgroup manager, and in groups, click on the group(s) you want to have the drive shown. Click on preferences and login. Click on the items tab, and then simply drag the mounted drive from the desktop into the items box, this will now display the drive as a login item, and will map the driver at login for those groups.

 

If you don't have any groups setup, let me know and ill post how you set those up.

[RabbieBurns]

I dont think we have groups set up. Is this something that I can implement pre capture that will persist once the rest of the computers are reimaged?

[ste1988]

Groups are setup in work group manager, and in a magic tri angle contain the AD groups

 

So my setup in workgroup manager is OSX_Staff, OSX_Students and there simply add my ad staff and student groups.

 

The beauty of everything being in WGM is that reimaging won't effect the settings along as the computer name stays the same after the reimage.

[HodgeHi]

You really should have migrated over to deploy studio from NetRestore by now in all honesty. As an avid user of net restore myself I can honestly say Deploy Studio is a step in the right direction and once you have worked out how it works you will never go back. After seeing the power of Deploy Studio I can see why Bombich ceased development on NetRestore. Deploy Studio IMO also knocks the socks off Apple's offering. It can also image PCs which support PXE 2.0.

 

I redirect quite a few folders to different locations. You could use WGM and the folder redirection MXC records to do this. However, I am hearing mixed feedback on what to use. The server.app should be used to create users but it seems that the profiles manager app doesn't cut it for managing the preferences. I haven't invested much time to see how Lion works with managing preferences so can't comment too much. But if it works in the same way as Snow Leopard Server then you should be able do what you want without and 3rd party apps.

 

Lion client also supports DFS now apparently, if you use this. I think this was one of the reasons to use Admit Mac previously.

 

ALso you could extend the AD schema to allow you to write preferences directly into the AD schema and manage them like group policy.

[RabbieBurns]

Whats this WGM? Is it part of OSX server? Im not sure what version of OSX server we have, the unit was purchased about 12-18 months ago. Its not lion.

 

Its only lion clients we are playing with here. We do have deploy studio up and running on an iMac with server on it which is in testing stage.

 

The real OSX server does SFA at the moment, apart from legacy netrestore.

 

Not too fussed about getting preferences or policies or locking them down or anything, and all the users are existing windows users. This is just a bunch of old imacs and new probooks for the fart department. The rest of the network is all windows so need to have the students saving in their regular network home folder.

 

Ive got some colleague/clown who is working on this but he's been at it since xmas and its getting frustrating seeing 0 progress and him just sitting there doing hee haw, on somehting that I reckon I could do with a bit of help from here and there in a week or so.

[HodgeHi]

If you go the the Apple and then click About this mac, it will give you the info you need.

 

10.5 = Leopard

10.6 = Snow Leopard (10.6.8 is perhaps the best version of all at the moment)

10.7 = Lion

 

10.6 is where I have stayed until I can tame the beast that is Lion.

 

To re-direct the OS X home dir into the windows Home Dir means that you would be running off a SMB share. Some folks here have stated that iPhoto doesn't work on anything but AFP.

 

Depending on what you are wanting to do may determine how you need to set these up.

[RabbieBurns]

Mostly it will be adobe CS5, and final cut express

[HodgeHi]

Ah, 2 packages we don't need to use, so I wouldn't be able to say. Perhaps someone with experience with these apps and networked home dirs could chime in

 

 

Our set up is the other way. We have our Macs using their default Home dirs and the Windows users re-directing their documents folder into the mac home dirs resulting in a merged profile. This works well with both OSes and is easier to setup with Windows Group Policy.