we've been seriously scratching our heads on this issue for the last few days. It's now time to ask other professionals on possible solutions for this.
The situation and what we're attempting to do:
We have some mac computers that we've joined to the campus Active Directory domain (which we don't have domain admin privileges on). These mac users use their AD accounts to login to their macs, which of course authenticates with the campus DCs using kerberos. We are trying to set them up as "mobile accounts", such that they hit their network home in most cases, but can fall back to an auto-synced local home directory. This network home resides on a Windows 2012 server we control, and they hit it via SMB.
For whatever reason, their mac computers are NOT correctly mounting the network location as their home. The users have full R/W access to the network location, and they are easily able to mount to it once they login to their macs. The issue seems to be getting the computer to respect what we've specified to be their network home directory in Active Directory.
To clarify again, we do NOT have domain admin privileges on the domain we're authenticating into. We do have the ability to set a couple special attributes on the user accounts such as "homeDirectory" and "unixHomeDirectory". I've set the value to "\server.something.edu\username" for both attributes, although technically the "homeDirectory" attribute should only be used by Windows users.
Anybody have a solution to this? We've exhausted our Google searches, read through countless threads everywhere and couldn't find a solution. Which is unusual because this seems like something that would be commonly done in an enterprise environment where windows and macs need to interop.
What I think the mac SHOULD be doing is taking the "\server.something.edu\username" string from Active Directory on login, mounting it, and setting it as the user's network home.
And just so others don't suggest it, we have already set the correct options in the mac's Directory Utility program to "Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location" using the SMB network protocol.
Additionally, here are some of the string formats we've used for the "unixHomeDirectory" and "homeDirectory" attributes in Active Directory, and their results:
//server.something.edu/username (created the directory locally)
://server.something.edu:/username (couldn't locate, set home to / )
smb://server.something.edu/username (couldn't locate, set home to / )
//server.something.edu:/username (created the directory locally)
I know some of the above sounds silly, but we thought we'd try random formats because we're not even sure what format it's really trying to accept.
Another important question I guess is are we setting the correct ActiveDirectory attribute by using "unixHomeDirectory"? Are we supposed to be setting something else to have the MAC recognize and use it as its' network home location?
The Mac is running OSX 10.10 (Yosemite), and we're trying to get it to mount to a Windows Server 2012.
Thanks for any insight into this!