Write Network Account Home Folders to /Users

Creating network home folders for users in Open Directory is typically a fairly painless task using OS X Server. What can be a little more painful is trying to figure out how to create a clean, locally cached home folder on a client workstation. The only obvious options for home folders in Workgroup Manager are None & the creation of an AFP or NFS share that’s stored on the server.

While leaving the settings in WGM set to None does result in the home folder getting cached on the local machine, it’s a less than perfect solution. For starters, the profiles get cached in the root of the drive, under a directory labelled 99. Plus the home folders it creates doesn’t have the usual directory structure – they only contain a Desktop and a Library folder. Not quite what we’re looking for. Ideally, the home folder would get created in the /Users directory, using the standard home folder template just like a local machine account is.

The fix to this is to make sure the NFSHomeFolder attribute is set for all your network accounts. That’s what happens when you select an AFP or NFS share – the path to the network share is written to the NFSHomeFolder attribute in the LDAP directory. When you leave the home folder setting at None, the default value is assigned to NFSHomeFolder – a value which happens to be 99 (hence the 99 directory that appears in the root directory on client machines whenever a user without a specified home folder logs in).

Set Network Account Home Folders to the Local Users Directory (/Users):

1. Launch WGM & login to your Open Directory server
2. If the Inspector tab in WGM isn’t visible, enable it in the Preferences
   1. Check the box next to “Show ‘All Records’ tab and inspector“
3. Select a network user account & click the Inspector tab
4. Locate the NFSHomeDirectory attribute – it should read 99 – & change this value to ‘/Users/username‘ where username is the shortname of the user.
5. Save your changes.

MCX Lessons from Macworld

Managing OS X, Greg Neagle’s OS X sysadmin blog, has a great PDF of slides from Greg’s Macworld presentation on MCX & managed preferences in OS X. If you’re involved in client management in any way on OS X, you should probably take a minute to check this out.

You can download the PDF direct from his blog here.