[twieland]

I have been mucking with this for some time now, and can't figure out how to make this work.

What I want is for Mac Users to have their /User directories remotely on a Windows 2000 Server.

I'm assuming that a remote mount needs to occur when the Mac is booted, not when a user logs in (too late). Then using NetInfo Manager I can change the user home directory location to /Volumes/'RemotelyMountedShare'/Users/'UserName'

Anyway, first I'd like to know if anyone out there has been able to accomplish this, and secondly, how you did it?

Thanks so much for any assistance!

- Tim

[twieland]

bump ... help ???

[ghporter]

Ouch! That's a tough one. It often takes quite a lot of fiddling around to get Windows users' settings right for a "home" directory on their own machines. There are too many alternatives, and too many options, some of which are selected (apparently arbitrarily) by the OS during installation, so you have to change settings in several places.

My best advice is to start reading the Windows help about home directories, and see if anything clicks.

[twieland]

OK, so I've made some progress on this. I've discovered how to mount a remote share (Mac file services from Windows 2000 Server) from a command line or shell script:

mkdir \Volumes\ShareName
mount_afp afp://usernameassword@server/share /Volumes/ShareName

This syntac works - now I need to figure out where to put this in a boot file.

I've tried /etc/rc, etc/rc.boot and etc/rc.common but it doesn't seem to work.

Any ideas on where to put my mount_afp command so that the share is mounted at startup, before a user logs in?

Thanks in advance for any help !!!

- Tim

[christ]

Why do you want the user's home directory to mount before he/she/it logs in? Why not either:

a) mount on login, or
b) not mount at all.

I don't know how to do a, because I have never had a use for it. I do, however, have users' home directories on a Windows 2000 server. what I do is:

1) connect to server (smb://<workgroup or domain>;<servername>/<users/username> (my users, both windows and mac, home directories are all of the form 'username' in the 'users' directory on the server, this may be different for you, but you get my drift)

2) log in using username and password, keeping the password on the keychain.

3) make alias of resulting server. Put this alias in the dock.


Then after logout and subsequent login, the user can:

4) access the server from the dock.

This seems to work fairly effectively, without any clever Un*x footwork, and it can be readily extended for any other shares that the user wants to mount on demand.

[twieland]

I'm a little confused ... how can a user login first and then have the smb mount establish their home directory on the Windows 2000 server?

Aren't a users login preferences, etc. stored somewhere in the /Users/username/ home directory? So how can you login first without the remote mount being established?

If I go into Netinfo Manager, and set a Users home directory to /Volumes/Users (where /Volumes/Users is the mount point to a remote server), and then try and login as that user, it doesn't work because the remote share has not yet been established.

Am I missing something here?

Thanks --

Tim

Originally posted by christ:
Why do you want the user's home directory to mount before he/she/it logs in? Why not either:

a) mount on login, or
b) not mount at all.

I don't know how to do a, because I have never had a use for it. I do, however, have users' home directories on a Windows 2000 server. what I do is:

1) connect to server (smb://<workgroup or domain>;<servername>/<users/username> (my users, both windows and mac, home directories are all of the form 'username' in the 'users' directory on the server, this may be different for you, but you get my drift)

2) log in using username and password, keeping the password on the keychain.

3) make alias of resulting server. Put this alias in the dock.


Then after logout and subsequent login, the user can:

4) access the server from the dock.

This seems to work fairly effectively, without any clever Un*x footwork, and it can be readily extended for any other shares that the user wants to mount on demand.

[christ]

OK - I misunderstood - On Windows all domain users have their own home directory - that is what I was referring to.

I missed the point that you were trying to put the macusers home directory on a remote server.