Users partition : How?

[bentoms]

Hi guys,

I wish to partition my macs boot volume so part is to be used just for users profiles.

I can easily partition using Casper, but how do you mount the partition as /Users/ OR tell the OS to create users only on this partition?

[lisacherie]

You could try doing this with mobile accounts and MCX.

1 Enable mobile accounts
2 Set mobile accounts to use a custom path
3 define the custom path

Within com.apple.MCX

<key>com.apple.cachedaccounts.CreateAtLogin</key>
<true/>
<key>cachedaccounts.create.location</key>
<string>path</string> <key>cachedaccounts.create.location.path</key>
<string>/Volumes/SomeOtherVolume/Users</string>

[robb1068]

We also modify the com.apple.MCX file to point to a separate partition with mobile accounts. Been our regular deployment for the last couple years and worked well under Leopard and Snow Leopard.

One caveat... Late last year we started testing Lion with FileVault 2 enabled. FileVault 2 didn't seem to like that the Users account was on a separate partition than the encrypted startup disk because it kept sporadically dropping the account from the login window. We ended up restoring the /Users location back to the startup disk for Lion client.

[Chris]

I wouldn't recommend doing this in 10.7 for the reasons stated above,
but in 10.6 you can.
I'm doing it this way:

- Drop a script in Casper Admin that takes care of the partitioning and set it to run before Imaging.
I do this with a script because i want the System partition to be always the same size and the Users partition taking up the remainder.
You can't do that with Casper at the moment.

- Run "vifs" in Terminal and set the mountpoint for your additional partition.
Would look something like

/dev/disk0s3 /Users hfs rw 1 2

After that you can create a Composer package from the modified /etc/fstab file and assign it to your imaging configuration.

Works like a charm for me...

[bentoms]

Hi Guys,

I've been trying this via Fstab & a configuration profile.

Issue is a home folder is still created in /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/<username> as well as /Volumes/Users/.

Both have the default folder structure, but the /Volumes/Users/<username> is the home folder...

10.7.3 test mac.. anyone seen this?

[tkimpton]

Think we needd that script promised by Oxford Uni at the user conf in London!