I'm helping a colleague set up his new Mac. Unfortunately, the IT department did some wonderful things (sarcasm) in order to maintain control of his machine. We set up an admin 'test' account to the chagrin of IT personnel who insisted that we stick nothing in /Users. He isn't even allowed to change his own password although he has admin privileges and is listed as an admin in the Accounts pane (System Prefs).
His home folder is not located in /Users where it should be in a standard Mac OS X installation, but rather in /Domain/xxx/yyy/Users/shortname, where xxx and yyy are subfolders.
We could not copy items from his assigned account to his test account due to default permissions, which we had to login into the test account to change (in order to allow admin group access) because OS X did not recognize his assigned account in the drop-downs (Ownership and Permissions).
Some web sites do not work in Safari (logging in) while in the test account they work fine. We tried disabling PithHelmet, clearing caches, clearing cookies, deleting plists related to Safari, etc. Then we tried running Applejack which, again, could not find the assigned account to clear caches from. Permissions also could not be repaired from Applejack.
Although the hard drive space shows that his assigned account is taking up space, we were both wondering if this account is imaged or a network account as opposed to one that is physically on that machine. Every time he logs into his assigned account, there is a short delay as if it were communicating over the network.
So what is going on? Is the assigned account really there or is this set up as a network user? He's not very thrilled about having to constantly enter/remember passwords across both accounts, especially since he has a hard time remembering the assigned password (that he cannot change) for his assigned account. How can we get the utility apps and even OS X itself to see his account? Will we screw things up by moving his home into /Users (IT said, no don't do that)?
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