AD remote home directory only works until mojave… Ideas?

stereo78
New Contributor

Hello Community, for our university mac pool we use our AD Networkaccount server. Ich unchecked "force local home directory...", so the User data shall be stored on our Network File Servers.

That worked well for a few years until Mojave - in Catalina, Big Sur and and Monterey the Macs hang after Network Login. When I select "force local home directory" it works, but i don't want the students data to be stored local.

Any Ideas? Apple and our Domain Administrators couldn't help me... does the remote home directory function work for other Jamf-Users?  Does anyone know where to find log files for the login pocess? Thank you

2 REPLIES 2

AJPinto
Honored Contributor III

I dont have an answer, but this is very much against Apples design direction for macOS. Have you looked at the network and share drive situation on the Macs when no one is logged in? If the network share is not available there would most certainly be issues with loading anything from that share. I would imagine the issue is figuring out which share needs to be connected or folder referenced as the user logs in.

 

It may be a better solution to not build a mobile account at login. A student will only lose data a few times before learning to not save things to the devices. 

stereo78
New Contributor

I do not use the mobile account option (as far as i understand then the home directory would be local again) ... And yes, the network shared home directory seems to cause the issue. My theory is something changed after mojave, maybe nfs mount until mojave or something like that, and from catalina smb, and the smb path might not be provided correctly by our AD. The mojave macs show a similar mounting path as our nfs mount path (cmd-i view of the home directory in the finder).

In the console I only see a crash report from a process named remindd ... 

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal: Illegal instruction: 4
Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0x4
Terminating Process: exc handler [647]

Sandbox: realpath(%@) for home directory failed %{public}d (%@)

...

It would be quite comfortable to have the remote home directory option as before: snapshot backups, even on tape, data access from every device on our campus, via remote desktop, mount at home via vpn ...

 

How would you "look at the network share situation" without being logged in?