Redirecting ~/Library to a network share.

[rayf]

Anyone have best practices for redirecting the ~/Library folder to a network share for Mac OS End-users? I have an Educator that insists that this happens. With a script run at first login, we can easily achieve the redirection of the Library folder to a network server using a symbolic link that points "/User/Username/Library" to the End-users home share. We do this succesfully for allother folders (e.g., Documents, Music, Movies, etc.). The problem is that we don't want to point to an empty folder, so we try to copy the contents of the local folder to the Home Share before deleting the local folder and creating the symbolic link. The folder appears to be quite large (~18GB), and copying it is impractical at first login. Furthermore, I'm finding that the Mac OS doesn't want to read plist files in the redirected library folder, which means most of our JAMF policies fail. I'm open for any suggestions.

[jamf-42]

Network home folders have not been supported on macos for quite a while, you may be able to muddle something together, but it's a bad idea and expect things to break regularly.. (It never worked well, even when it's was possible with macos server) 

[AJPinto]

This sounds like it will be very problematic even if you could get it to work. MacOS has removed home folder network redirection in favor of iCloud as far as I am aware. 

[mainelysteve]

Yeah I agree with @AJPinto  and @jamf-42. Folder redirection has either been deprecated and or it's not, but certainly has been mothballed. HomeSync was deprecated back in 10.6 and it was never recommended to sync the ~/Library folder. Relying on old Windows like tricks isn't the greatest idea.

I guess some context here would be helpful to figure out what this particular educator (gotta love em') hopes to get out of this exercise. The ~/Library folder should really just be caches and preference files. I'm guessing this may be some sort of lab environment if you're going out of your way to get files into a network share?

[rayf]

The Educator would like to have settings follow the students from one computer to another. I'm a Windows administrator on a learning curve with the Mac OS, and so not really sure if what is requested is achievable, or practical. If we are only talking about a couple of folders (e.g., Preferences. Application Support, or other) then maybe we can do something to fulfill the request.  

[mainelysteve]

I'd start with inventorying the applications being used and determine if they can be managed by a configuration profile or policy. It's a bit kludgy moving preference files around.

[jamf-42]

From 2018, I wouldn't even try. It's not a function of the OS, while it talks about mobile, they hardly worked.. Many hours of pain back in the day 

 

[Qwheel]

We used to use Automount_fs within MacOS up until High Seirra... but it broke after then. Presumably because Apple knows best and doesn't like people deviating.

It was used within our video editing workstations so students dumping stuff on the Desktop, were actually dumping stuff on the network share.

Irony is, the network share wouldn't be up to transferring 4K video streams nowadays.
We now just mount the share at login via an osascript. It's in my understanding that it's being used less and less thanks to services like Frame IO and portable storage.