Workflow for Student / Faculty home folder mount on login

[ElisabethMorrow]

I have done a bit of research here on JAMF Nation on this subject and I'm still very new to Casper so I'm having trouble making sense of the big picture. I've found a couple of threads on AppleScripting that might help with the actual home folder mount, but I'm looking for some input on how to implement it. On any one of my computers, a faculty member or student is able to login. The faculty and student shares are on two different servers. How do I set this up so that the correct network home folder is mounted depending on whether a student or faculty member logs in?

If any of you have this same or similar setup, how do you accomplish this task?

[etippett]

Unfortunately I think this is a place in which Mac OS X is extremely lacking. What is your backend directory setup for user authentication? If you're using AD and the proper shares happen to be set as the home folder path in AD, you can use the built-in AD plug-in on Mac to mount them by checking the box in Directory Utility to "Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location"

In our environment, we have way too many shares for that to be enough, so I worked on a custom script/Automator app that parses the user's group memberships and mounts shares accordingly. It runs as a launchagent or can be launched manually by the user. It's rather similar to what @bentoms has made available here:

You can also cough up $5000 for Apple to do it for you with Enterprise Connect ;)

Good luck!
Eric

[ElisabethMorrow]

Users authenticate through Open Directory. This was no problem last year using a configuration profile in Apple Profile Manager, but the JSS doesn't offer the same option to auto-mount the network home, at least that I can see.

[bentoms]

@j.miller If you look at a record via dscl or maybe [Directory Utility](lhttps://macmule.com/2014/05/03/how-to-use-directory-utility-to-view-an-ad-objects-attributes/), there should be a field that contains the home folder.

Once found, a script could be concocted to map at login.