We've been using Augmented Home Folders fairly successfully for over a year now. There are some caveats but on the whole it seems to work really well and keeps users SMB home folders clear.
However I seem to have hit a stumbling block. Previously we were binding the stations into AD and OD and the boxes "Force local home directory on startup disk" and "Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location" were both checked in Directory Utility. This was almost perfect because it provided the augmented home folder and also the SMB home folder as a mount. However, with this setup users had no access to the /Users folder but this only affected minor things like iTunes authorisation (we're a school and this isn't really an issue). Unfortunately the new version of the SMART board tools places files inside /Users/Shared and won't run if the user cannot access them. So now I've unchecked both those boxes which provides the augmented home folder AND access to the /Users folder (although I now have to mount the SMB home folder with a script instead).
This also brings issues though. It seems to be the cause of the problem that I wrote about here
http://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopi...howtopic=25308 where MCX preferences are only partially applied (particularly mail account settings). I can confirm that if both of these boxes are checked then all MCX settings are applied properly but if they are unchecked settings are only partially applied. This is true on 10.5.x and 10.6.x as well.
So, I seem to be stuck with either no access to the /Users folder which will prevent certain applications running or MCX preferences not being applied properly. Is anyone else using augmented home folders? Has anyone else experienced similar issues?
October 2nd, 2009, 05:37 AM
