Managed Preferences knocking out mapped AD Home Directories

[rusty_adams]

We bind our OSX machines to AD manually through the directory utility (there are 127 domains in the forest and we get some crazy authentication issues if we don't, but that's another story....)

Everything works fine until I try to configure Managed Preferences to disable some iTunes stuff. As soon as I scope my test machine to a managed preference and reboot, I am greeted with a ? instead of a home folder.

If I remove it from the scope and reboot, everything goes back to normal.

Any workarounds to solve this conflict?

In Directory Utility we just check "Use UNC path", use smb, and check the default user shell.

[m_entholzner]

you should really not use MCX any more... MCX is deprecated since 10.7 and using them could lead into multiple issues. use config profiles instead, they will make you happy.

[rusty_adams]

I try to do almost everything with config profiles and policies, but some of the settings I see sitting there in managed preferences are exactly what I want to do, and don't seem to have an equivalent anywhere in config profiles.

Thanks for the information. We're a school district that is transitioning from almost all Windows to the opposite extreme, so while my Mac knowledge is growing daily, there are lots of "duh" moments still. I see settings like that in Casper and just assume they will fly in my environment since all our stuff is 10.9 or better.

Fortunately, all I've really tried to do with Managed Preferences so far is to turn off iTunes Radio, so it isn't a horrible loss.

[m_entholzner]

Whatever you can do with MCX, you can do with profiles. What you need is the "Custom" payload. You can upload whatever setting you want and get exactly the profile you want that does the same as the MCX.

[Jens_Mansson]

@rusty.adams You can use mcxToProfile