Google Drive as an AD home folder

[Sean_M_Harper]

Hey everyone!

Looking for anyone who has had experience making this work. We are looking at all options to make AD mount a students Drive (folder) as their main home folder. We are also open to this being done directly, or through an intermediate service.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Chris_Hafner]

I will be really interested in the results of this endeavor. My guts are nothing but a jumble of "Giant Flashing Red Warning Lights" thinking of the serious pitfalls associated with that type of thing... then again, it is intriguing. One way or another, that's a lot of bandwidth and reliance on externals services for basic operability.

P.S. Any reason why you would not just use mobile accounts?

[Sean_M_Harper]

Yes, because we have 6000 PC clients, and 1200 or so mac clients. I was asked to look into a cloud service instead of using internal storage, and since we are a k12 org we get google drive free (like all users) linked to our domain.

Frankly, we will still keep some storage (confidential and financial for example) in house, but we are looking to move student storage completely to the "cloud". I should note: We are NOT willing to install the Google Drive application onto devices in schools (due to their need to attach to each profile, as well as download or sync data to the local profile from the drive itself).

[Chris_Hafner]

Wow, I don't envy you. Even if you sort it out, can your users live in the 5Gig account?

[Sean_M_Harper]

We have separate local shares available should they need more space for say... video calibration.

[Nix4Life]

Watching This as I got a tap on the shoulder to look at GADS

[Chris_Hafner]

Sorry, I didn't completely process your last post properly. You're trying to store the AD mobile accounts in Google Drive... per CAL from the AD itself?

[pickerin]

If you're serious about looking at a Cloud Provider to replace local/file server storage, check out Box.com. SAML integration, corporate management interfaces, solid encryption, sharing options, etc. I know several LARGE companies that are mass replacing local files servers with Box.

[BaddMann]

We've been thinking along these lines as well. But I can't even get our current network share to mount correctly since we were forced into Power Broker. So the following is all "plumbing dreaming".

If you do procure this, the only way I can see it working without saturating your bandwidth is to have a NOC residing server act as a caching server.

It would have to authenticate to google drive on behalf of the user, and store a local copy of all documents not created by google. Then use that copy for Home syncing. Maybe a discussion with google on this matter would have to take place, but a slightly more experimental API could probably fulfill this need.

You can then have a timed trash collection process delete caches that have not be accessed within a certain time frame. Ether dictated by the SIS system, usage statistics or a combination of both.

Any uncached users would have a longer than normal login (jamfhelper informed) for the first time as the cache server collects their Drive files for the first time, maybe prioritize certain files above others for critical use. ( such as library files ) Once the critical files are downloaded, login proceeds as expected, but Home sync or folder re-direction would have to catch the other files as the caching server completes it's syncing.

This is all dreaming at this point, but with enough effort I could see it being possible with just about any only "cloud" service. I had originally thought this through using AWS, as it was the only game in town for a long time, but we now have google drive with On site authentication.

If Google isn't able to help us directly I propose we contact Cloud Sherpas. They have very capable staff that helped our whole District make a very seamless migration to Google and a few programmers on their teams have had these pipe dream conversations.

Looking forward to this.
Oliver