Windows Home Directories on a Mac

I have a Mac running 10.4 server acting as file server on a network on a Windows 2003 SBS domain. The Mac is not bound to active directory yet, and users network to it since it is a member of the workgroup.
My IT admin wants to set up roaming user profiles for my staff. He wants to store the windows home directories on the Mac.
What do I have to do to accomplish this. I assume I will have to bind the Mac to active directory as a server.
I would like to store the windows home directories on a partition that I regularly back-up.
Can someone walk me through this?

Hi Stephen have a look on page 27 of this document
http://applemac.csd.sc.edu/PDFS/MacOSXwithActiveDirectory.pdf
May be of some help.
Cheers.

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NFS Home Directories Yosemite

Has anyone successfully used NFS home directories for network logins?
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Apple stopped officially supporting NFS based home directories when Lion and Server.app was released. I have not done extensive testing but I certainly find two sessions using fast user switching and AFP works with Mavericks clients.
As far as I can see if a Snow Leopard server was connected to a Mavericks or Yosemite OD server it would still be possible for the Snow Leopard server to register an NFS home directory share in to Open Directory. This suggests that it might be possible to do the same even with a Mavericks or Yosemite server but that one would have to do all the work by hand in the command line. The logic for this conclusion is that Mavericks and Yosemite still include NFS even if they do not provide a GUI means to configure it and OD itself would appear to still be able to store records relating to NFS locations.
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Completely getting round Adobe's long time issues with network home directories
The same for some other third-party applications
Allowed 20+ users all on the same server to be logged in to their individual home directories in a Mac Terminal Server setup
This was all back in the days of using Snow Leopard Server.
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New Server Accounts and Home Directories

Greetings Everyone,
Hoping someone here has enough patience to help me figure out what I'm sure is a realtively simple problem...
I'm setting up a Mac Mini Server (10.6.8) in my Unviersity Lab and connecting 6 Mac Mini's (Snow Leopard). We have a bunch of people that need accounts, and obviously using a network account run from the server is the simplest and best option.
As I'm not THAT familiar with servers and/or Mac's, I've spent quite a bit of time looking through the Workgroup Manager and Server Preferences, and have managed to set up accounts for everyone and tweak them to my desired preferences.
However, when I try to login to a user network account from another computer, the login screen "shakes" and does not allow me to login. After some sleuthing through various forums, I've come to the conclusion that my "home Directories" are not set up properly.
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The first step is to define an AFP sharepoint in Server Admin, and check the box for "Enable Automount" (under the share point tab) which you then set for user home folders and group folders.
Then, in WGM, on the Home tab for each of your users, you will see that sharepoint as an option. Simply select it, click "create home now" and then save.

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Hi,
I have a Mac Mini Server with Snow Leopard 10.6.2, with open directory master set up and then joined to Active Directory and that works fine. The only thing is that I would like the macbooks to log in, and display a home directory that resides on the mac server so they can save their video editting work. So the user has 2 home directories one on windows server one on mac but same user account.
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Hi
+"Can this be done at all???"+
There are a number of approaches you could use? Modifying the AD Schema is one way. This method is generally not considered as a viable one because of the risk of SP updates breaking the modified schema. A popular way is to use the methods outlined by Mike Bombich:
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/activedir.html
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There's a lot of useful stuff over on edugeek.net:
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/
Read some of the stickies at the top of the Forum. One of them refers to Corey Carson's AD-OD Sandbox. Another site you should visit is:
http://www.afp548.com/search.php?query=AD-OD+Integration&type=all&mode=search
Tony

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I would like to locate my user home directories in a seperate location than my system drive. Currently the home directories default to the Users sharpoint on my system hard drive. I have yet to find an option that allows me to redirect this. Thank you in advance for your help.

1. Create the folder that will store your home directories, wherever you want to put it.
2. Share the folder in Workgroup Manager.
3. Make sure you create a network mount record for the share (Network Mount tab in Workgroup Manager).
4. Select a user or users, click the Homes tab, and select the share point you just created.
David Walton

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Word 2008 for Mac and NFS mounted home directories "Save File" issues

Greetings everyone,
(Long time lurker, first time poster here)
I admin a small network (under 20 workstaitons) with a centralized NFS server, with user home directories mounted via NFS upon login. Users are authenticated via LDAP. This is all working fine, there is no problem here. The problem lies when my users use Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac. When they attempt to save a file to thier Desktop (or Documents or any folder under thier home dir) they are met with the following message:
(dialog box popup)
"Word cannot save or create this file. The disk maybe be full or write-protected. Try one or more of the following: * Free more memory. * Make sure the disk you want to save the file on is not full, write-protected or damaged. (document-name.ext)"
This happens regardless of file format (Doc, Docx, Txt) and regardless of saved location under the network mounted dir. I've noticed that when saving Word creates a .tmp file in the target directory, which only further confuses me to the underlying cause of the issue.
When users logon to a local machine account and attempt the save, there is no issue.
I have found many posts in other commuity forums, including this one, indicating that the issue is a .TempoaryItems folder in the root of the mounted directory. This folder already exists and is populated with entries such as "folder.2112" (where 2112 is the uid of the LDAP user). I find other posts indicating that this is an issue with Word:2008 and OSX10.8, with finger pointing in either direction, but no real solution.
I have installed all Office for Mac updates from Microsoft (latest version 12.3.6).
I have verified permissions of the user's home dir.
I have also ensured that this issue effects ONLY Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac apps, LibreOffice and other applications have no issue.
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Thanks.
~k

I can't tell you how to fix bugs in an obsolete version of Office, but a possible workaround is to use mobile home directories under OS X Server. The home directories are hosted locally and synced with the server.

HT202213 my mac can see windows home sharing but windows cant see my mac home sharing?

Hi,
I have set up home sharing on a mac and a windows pc. My mac ITunes is showing the 'sharing' menu with my windows pc listed however the windows ITunes isn't showing the 'sharing' menu........ can anyone assist please?
thanks

DIngo Dave 69 wrote:
I am running Snow Leopard and on my seperate windows 7 machine I can see and connect to my mac. However I cannot get the Mac to connect to the Windows 7 machine. Even home sharing is not working on itunes.
Can anyone help?
Maybe
On the Win7 machine,
1. Ignore everything to do with Homegroup.
2. Go > Computer > Users > User; right click on User and chose Share with > Specific people; and Set to share with a specific individual or Everyone—both with Read/Write permission.
3. Go Control Panel > Network and Sharing Options > Advanced sharing Settings, and Turn on network discovery, Turn on file and printer sharing, Turn off public folder sharing , and Turn off password protected sharing (unless sharing won’t occur without turning it on).
4. Restart (probably not necessary, but I’d do it).
On the Sno machine,
1. Go System Preferences > Sharing > Check File sharing > Go Options > Enable SMB sharing.
2. Go System Preferences > Network > Select Airport or Ethernet depending on what you are going to be using. I am assuming you will be using wireless below. Let me know if not true.
3. Having selected Airport, select ask to join new networks and show Airport status in menu bar.
4. Click advanced > click remember networks this computer has joined > Click Wins > Enter the ip address of your Win7 machine in the WINS server box > Enter the Win7's workgroup name in the workbook box unless it already is there (look in the drop down menu too). In all likelihood the name is workgroup, but check on the Win7 machine.
5. Restart (probably not necessary, but I’d do it).
Try to connect to your Win7. Use Go menu > Connect to server. In trying to connect, type smb://ipaddress (of the Win7 machine). If, for some reason, you are asked to, input a user name and password, then use you user name and password for the Win7. Don't save anything to Keychain now and actually never for making network connections.

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For Boot Camp issues please repost in the Boot Camp forum located by clicking Boot Camp

Mac OS X Server, Network Home Directories & Time Machine

hi,
I am using mac os x server to manage a small workgroup using open directory and network home directories, the server is backed up using time machine. From what I understand, time machine does work on network home directories.
However, as I am backing up my server using Time Machine, it is already backing up the user directories. Is there any way of getting a client to access the server time machine backup to access the backups of the user directories?
Of course, it would be easy to restore files by logging onto the server as the user and restoring from there. I am just wondering if there is a more elegant solution available to do this from a client machine.
any thoughts?
thx!

Hi,
I am trying to do the same exact thing and find that it is best to do this locally (for now). Not only is the network way slower, but it seems to make things worse. For example, things backed up via the client machine are routed from the FTP server/volume mount and different permission wise. When you try to restore them locally, it should work, but the folder had different permissions because they were initially created in root (for me). So, I hope they would come out with something better than what is available now. Thanks!

AD mobile account stores Mac user profile in Windows home directory

My Windows Server 2003 AD accounts have roaming profiles and user home directories stored in different locations on Windows Server 2003 servers. How do I prevent my MacOS tiger clients from copying the local user profiles for AD mobile accounts to the respective remote home directories?
This unwanted behavior is quite similar to using Windows 9x clients in similar AD environment.

I do need to automount the network home directory but do not desire to have it sync with the local home directoy. I disabled the "create mobile account at login" option and enabled "force local home directory on startup disk" and "use unc path from active directory ..." and these appear to have resolved the problem. Unfortunately the network home directory no longer automounts, nor do network accounts show up at the logon prompt (strangely enough, they can be configured to autologin.)

Unable to map home directories on windows xp workstation

I have Snow Leopard Server 10.6 installed and all clients are windows xp SP3 workstations. Home directories were mapping fine through a .bat logon file until I played around with permissions because one person was not able to delete files in his directory. I don't remember exactly what I did, but after doing a propagate of some permissions, the users are no longer able to have the .bat file map their home directory. It still maps the group directories just fine. It's as if the home directory is not recognized as a HOME directory. Is there some way to reset the home directory for each of the users or do I have to move their current home directories to another folder and then recreate them all?

Another piece of the information - When I log onto the server as admin and open server admin, I am getting an error message saying that I cannot connect to my server. We only have one server and I am logged onto it. If I log on to the server as root, everything looks fine.

Windows Home Directories on a Mac

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