Active Directory user home directory set to /var/empty

[benfifield]

While trying to troubleshoot some weird problems with an account on one of our shared Macs, I noticed that the account was set to use /var/empty as its home directory. Does anyone know how to clear out this account's configuration on the Mac so that it creates a new mobile account for the AD user? The broken account does not show up in System Preferences, and there is no folder for it in /Users. I've tried

dscl . -delete /Users/account

but that just fails saying Invalid Path. This is a shared computer, and all of the other accounts are working correctly.

[StoneMagnet]

Try deleting them with the sysadminctl command. See sysadminctl --help for the syntax.

[benfifield]

@StoneMagnet No luck there. "User not found"

Thanks for mentioning that though, I hadn't heard of that command before!

[StoneMagnet]

@benfifield It arrived with Yosemite, and makes user related scripts much cleaner if you're not concerned about older versions of OS X (luckily all my installation's Macs are running El Cap).

[draeconis]

We're having this issue as well here. Some user accounts are created as network accounts even if our AD bind is set to create Mobile accounts. This account's $HOME is set to /var/empty. The user then is spammed with requests to repair their Library folder, which if processed starts to effectively chown files/folders in /var/empty to the logged in user, which is bad. No idea why this is happening, or why only certain accounts seem affected.

[mattiasvdm]

Had the same issue today. Somehow the 'require confirmation before creating a mobile account' was ticked. The user got the question and clicked No. His home folder was created inside the /var/empty directory. I unticked the box and removed his homefolders from the /var/empty directory but this didn't help. Finally I found out that I could manually convert his network account into a mobile account. Go to system preferences - Users & Groups and unlock it. There you have a button saying 'Create mobile' or something similar. Click that and it will logout and ask for the users password. After that the account is mobile.

[donmontalvo]

This happened a couple times to me when working remotely using a teleworker box.

Fix (for us, YMMV) has been to log in as a local account, ensure you are on your company network (teleworker box; or physically there), then unbind/rebind. Luckily we have policy triggers to do both.

PS, posting this now, because it just happened, and I remembered the fix, so sharing here.

[abaines]

I am having this same issue, Sorta..

1 unbind from Domain A
2. bind to domain b
when I log back in even as a domain admin my account is trying to be created in var/empty
any help would be appreciated!!