Binding to AD - custom home directory

bnacar
New Contributor

Background: we have a small fleet of Macs (High Sierra) which we are trying to bind to an AD forest. We don't have much control over this instance of AD as it is managed by a different entity than ourselves, so what I'm describing here assumes that we just have to work with the data we've got.

Using Directory Utility, the bind works fine except for one crucial piece which effectively prevents users from doing anything useful upon logging in: setting the home directory. We place home directories at /home/$USER instead of /Users/$USER (for complicated backward compatibility reasons), but it seems to expect the home directory to live at /Users/$USER, or the homeDirectory attribute (which isn't set for most users), or some other location - not completely sure. In any case, it defaults to /var/empty for all non-admin users.

Is there a way to set users' home directories on login to /home/$USER across the board, without modifying AD itself?

For example, via Directory Utility (and the command-line equivalent using dscl/dsconfigad), I see that it's possible to specify a limited set of AD attribute mappings, namely uidNumber and gidNumber for users and gidNumber for groups, which works fine. I'm looking for the equivalent for setting home directories.

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