AFP and SMB Home Folders

[Drapec]

Has anybody managed to find a way of using both AFP home folders and SMB folders?

 

What I am trying to do is have both setup on a students/staff login so that they can access there windows based home directory and also access the Mac home directories for things like Aperture, iphoto garage band etc which require a lot of storage room. We Limit Student storage to 150mb so we need to be able to use our current promise storage to store the home folders.

 

I have read a few forums with scripts on but i can't seem to get them to work.

 

I have got a working magic (golden) Triangle I can login to the any Mac with the any AD login and it works I can see there windows based home folder.

 

Any Help would be much appreciated.

 

Our Current setup is:

 

Mac OS X Server (xServe) 10.7.5 running OD as Master and bound to AD

Mac Clients 10.7.5

Windows 2008R2 Domain Controller

[kirchie]

What we've done is upped the limit for students who we know use the Macs (Art students mainly) so that they have 2GB instead of the usual 250MB. I know that you're not supposed to have things like iPhoto running over a network, but it's working so far!

[Drapec]

Thanks for the idea but it won't really work in our environment as we mainly use aperture and the average aperture library is about 20GB. Our promise storage array is about 12tb so that's why we want to use that.

[Ashm]

We do this with Snow Leopard and have their home drives mounted via AFP and then use an Apple Script on login to mount their Windows my documents.

[Drapec]

So are you are using there AD login or have you setup an OD account for them?

 

Can you send me the details of how you have done this so I can have a look to see if would work for us?

[pixellip]

Hey there......I would appreciate if you could share this script Ashm as I am trying trying to do just the same thing.....I am still well in the dark about it all. Kirchie: It looks as though we will have to increase to 2gb (for 250 users). Gulp!

[Drapec]

like i said unfortunately that is not possible in our environment. We have 2500 students plus another 200 members of staff all sharing 4 terabytes worth of storage we just can't up all 40 or so student accounts to the required storage capacity that is required for aperture and stuff. We need a script that maps there current Mac home folder on the promise storage server we have to there AD account on there desktop (mac only) and if they don't have a home folder on the array then it creates one on log in.

[Ashm]

So are you are using there AD login or have you setup an OD account for them?

 

Can you send me the details of how you have done this so I can have a look to see if would work for us?

Yep AD logins, standard AD/OD magic triangle set up. We have accounts set up as mobile accounts so when a user logs in it syncs their mac homedir from the AFP share on the Xserve down to the local mac hard drive and will then sync changes in the background and also a final sync on log off. Seems to work well from a performance point of view as the user is essentially working from the hard disk rather than the live network share.

 

The Apple script we use to mount staff SMB home drives as a drive on the desktop is as follows (for the students it's Students-2012$ etc depending on year of entry):

 

set MyName to do shell script "whoami"

try
mount volume "smb://FILESERVER/Staff$/" & MyName & "/Documents"
end try

 

There's probably a better way to do it, but I couldn't find an easy way at the time to get the current username so I resorted to using the whoami nix command.

Edited November 20, 2012 by Ashm

[Drapec]

Thanks I will defiantly give this a try. However I might sound totally and utterly thick now so I apologies for this but how are you giving staff/students AFP home drives with there AD log-ins? have you un-ticked the use UNC option? and how have you pointed them to the xserve? sorry about this but i have inherited this from somebody else and they haven't left me with any instructions or anything?

[tom_pearson]

Hi Drapec,

 

I have this configured on our iMacs by mounting an AFP share at boot up, then using Folder Redirection on Workgroup Manager to redirect home drives to this AFP share. Users SMB home directories are then displayed on the desktop as a mounted volume by default.

We're running 10.6.8 Client & Server in a 'Magic Triangle'

 

If you'd like more info PM me.

 

Thanks