Well, I am not sure why it is not working, that sure is odd. I wish I knew more about apple script as I am sure there is a way to alias that folder on the desktop.

I can look into it and get back. I do not use automount in my environment because I don't want 8,000 clients automounting shares. So, instead I use scripts which are triggered by actions. Seems to work OK for me.

New Life to an old issue
 

I wanted to bring some new life to this old topic in case someone out there has been able to accomplish this. To save you the trouble of reading the whole thread, I'm basically running Active Directory and Open Directory together and would like to find a way to have a shortcut to a user's home folder appear automatically at login the same way the shortcut on the dock is created. The reason for this is the dock shortcut is only available from the desktop and not from within applications. So when a user tries to save, they still have to drill all the way down through the network to their home folder in order to do so. The workaround up until now has been to have a tech login as the user and create a shortcut to their home folder for them under "places" in finder. I would like to automate this process to save our tech's time and to allow users to go computer to computer without having to be setup to save this way.

Bottom line, I would like to accomplish one of the following...

1. Have a symlink or alias created on the desktop automatically to the user's home folder using the same code or script that runs to create the dock shortcut (I have no idea where the code for this is buries in OSX, I can't find it)

2. Have the user's folder show up automatically under "places" in finder when they login.

If anyone thinks they may be able to help me, please reply. This seems like such a simple thing to do but it's turned out to be quite impossible.

Hi Lenny,

Im trying to do the exact same thing as yourself, not getting anywhere.
Been looking at web forums for months and came across this one during the week.
I had a look at the script you were working on with tlarkin.
One thing i noticed when running this. if you go back to the basics of just getting the current user, im not sure this returns any value when being ran against an AD account.

For example, if i run the whoami command or just use $USER in a simple bash script when logged on as a local user and echo it back out to the screen, it returns the username that is logged on.
i just had it do the following

echo 'user logged in is:' $USER

which returned
user logged in is: admin

Set this up as a loginhook and then logged in as a user that is in AD (the mac is binded to AD and OD)
when i logged in and checked the console in utilites, it returned
user logged in is:
doesnt return anything
same with the whoami command.

Ive tried this on a mac running 10.5 and also 10.6, both binded to OD and AD.

Were trying to set it up so that all users home folders are stored on a windows 2003 R2 box, and have it working in a way that when the user logs on, their home folder appears in the dock.
Only problem with this is that if they are using MS word or Adobe Photoshop, and click file -> save as, they have to browse the network and be able to identify where their home folder is on a server.
most of our users arent savy enough to know this.
Reason we have our home folders on a 2003 server box is that the users will also be logging into windows XP machines.

We dont want to go down the road of using mobile accounts, as I work in a college and most users tend to forget to log out when finished, meaning their files would not be synced up to their home folders

so, to go back to basics, does anyone know a way of getting the currently logged on username when it is an Active Directory account?

Frustrating isn't it? I wish there was a way to grab the code that OSX uses when it creates the dock shortcut. It does exactly what I'm trying to do except I want the shortcut on the desktop or under "Places" in finder. Hopefully somebody will reply to this someday that figured it out.

Have you tried creating a mount point in WGM and then using it to map the home directories to the mac clients?

The mount point created in WGM only maps to the root share, what would I need to do to automatically create the home folder shortcut from that?

No idea about AD but, I wrote a script that checks identity a few different ways. Perhaps one of them will turn out to be usable.

$ cat whu

This script did return a lot of useful info about the logged in user, including group membership, username even the User's ID#. I just don't know how to make a script that pulls this info and maps a home folder shortcut to the desktop.

Is there a command that pulls the AD user's home folder path? (there must be since the OD plug in can pull it) and if so, how can that command be used to create a desktop shortcut to that folder?

Well I have nested home folders on all my servers and I mount and the home folder path, the full path is clarified. You will need to probably make sure the mounts work in Server Admin first, then write in the full path.

I create presets, off a test user then import my users with those presets in WGM and it maps the full path, not just the root folder where the home folders live. I have different paths for every grade/school and they are all nested with in one parent folder called homes.

attached a screen shot

In your set up, do you have users and groups in OD that mimic that of AD, and then you bind your client to AD just for authentication correct?

No, we do not import users into OD so I cannot configure the users like you do. We use AD for authentication and Preferences but we only use Open Directory groups for this and then make AD user groups members of the OD groups. The AD plug in allows for the user's home folder to appear on the dock, I'm trying to harness that exact same process to put a shortcut on the desktop instead.

Ah OK, I see now, I guess I was not grasping that before, sorry for any confusion I may have given. Well, is that even an option? If you were to import all users from LDAP from AD into OD you could completely manage and all sorts of stuff which I do in OD. I know that may not be an option for you so I won't venture any further, but maybe it will be something you can ponder and campaign for down the road.

Now, looking at your issues at hand. If the AD plug in puts the home folder on the dock, and it is mapped to the home folder in AD on the AD servers, have you tried just creating a folder which is an alias to the dock, or do you want the folder to actually be physically moved to the desktop?

I haven't used AD much in the past 3 years because this current job I have is pure OD, but my last job did have AD so I am rusty on it.

That would work but I have no idea how to create an alias to the dock, I didn't think that was possible.

OK, so when you log in to a machine and the home folder is mounted, where is it mounted at? Assuming somewhere in /Volumes?

Can you get that info?

The home folder shortcut on the dock is nester two, sometimes three levels deep but the root volume is mounted on the desktop. In other words, I have share in \\server\myshare\subfolder\myhome

The dock has a shortcut to myhome but the volume that is mounted is myshare.

I would like that shortcut directly to the home folder placed not only on the dock but on the desktop or under "places" in finder.

OK in post #39 of this thread I suggested making a symbolic link. So if you create a folder on the desktop and then link it to that full network path, does it work?

if you log in, and have one mounted what is the output of this command:

ls -al /Volumes

Unfortunately creating a symbolic link didn't work, I just get a "file does not exist" message. I do not think this would be a practical solution anyway since an emply folder would have to be created at login and them mapped as a symlink to the home folder through a script.

The output of the command you gave me shows the network volumes and the local hard drive as well as my permissions to each.

So it doesn't actually put anything on the machine, ie it doesn't mount anything. It just puts a dock item that is an alias to a network share?

I logged in as an AD user, the home folder appears on the dock.
I typed in the command:

ls -al /Volumes

and it returned the following
total 56
drwxrwxrwt@ 5 root admin 170 26 Feb 10:36 .
drwxrwxr-t 35 root admin 1258 25 Feb 14:02 ..
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 admin admin 6148 26 Feb 10:35 .DS_Store
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 26 Feb 10:26 IMAC05 -> /
drwxrwxrwx+ 1 4294967195 MYDOMAIN\domain users 16384 25 Feb 15:04 Personal$

(ive substituted our real domain name with "MYDOMAIN in the above output)
The name of the machine in this example is IMAC05

the user that is logging on is called "mediauser" and their home folder is located on a windows 2003 server in a share called "Personal$"
\\myserver\Personal$\mediauser

From my understanding, the folder that contains all of the home folders (i.e. Personal$) is mounted as a volume, but the users home folder is not, so not sure if you can use the info here to create an alias to the users home folder and place it on the desktop

Any ideas?

Hmm,

I don't have AD, but it seems it does mount the folder here...

drwxrwxrwx+ 1 4294967195 MYDOMAIN\domain users 16384 25 Feb 15:04 Personal$


So the question is, can you alias that mount (or sym link) to a folder that shows up on the desktop. Have you tried searching through the forums over at www.afp548.com? There are lots of AD/OD articles over there.