Mobile Network User Accounts on External Drives

[sevoneone]

Been awhile since I played with mobile accounts for network users. It used to be you could select any attached Volume to store the user's home directory.

Short Story: I'm testing Google's secure LDAP service so users on our Google Workplace domain could easily login to a couple of "community" Macs we have setup in one of our offices. I want the user's information to be wiped when they log off (and the Guest account option is a little too restrictive for what we want to do), but I also want to give frequent users a way to take their files with them.

I've got Google LDAP authentication working, and I've figured out how to create a script to run on logout that will "rm -r" the home directory and dscl -delete if the home directory is on the startup volume. What I'd like is to give the user the option to create their mobile user account on a USB flash drive or external HDD/SSD. However, the only Volume available to select when setting up the mobile account is the current startup volume.

Does anyone here know if it is still possible to setup mobile accounts on an external disk in Catalina or BigSur?

 

[hobowankenobi]

I wonder if NoMAD Login would be useful as they seem to support LDAP as well as AD? If so, you could allow a local account to be created with the Google credentials. Could still remove accounts at log out if you choose. NoMAD works very nicely, at least in an AD environment, mght be worth testing.

I don't think I would go down the road of home directories on an external...too many variables and hurdles. Why not mount some cloud storage for users to access instead of an external?

Oh, and by the way...kudos on authenticating against google LDAP on Macs. First I have heard of it being used.

Seems like a commercial product is not what you are looking for...but for anybody that is following along, Deep Freeze has had much of this functionality for a couple of decades.

 

[fiscus04]

Been awhile since I played with mobile accounts for network users. It used to be you could select any attached Volume to store the user's home directory.

Short Story: I'm testing Google's secure LDAP service so users on our Google Workplace domain could easily login to a couple of "community" Macs we have setup in one of our offices. I want the user's information to be wiped when they log off (and the Guest account option is a little too restrictive for what we want to do), but I also want to give frequent users a way to take their files with them.

I've got Google LDAP authentication working, and I've figured out how to create a script to run on logout that will "rm -r" the home directory and dscl -delete if the home directory is on the startup volume. What I'd like is to give the user the option to create their mobile user account on a USB flash drive or external HDD/SSD. However, the only Volume available to select when setting up the mobile account is the current startup volume.

Does anyone here know if it is still possible to setup mobile accounts on an external disk in Catalina or BigSur?

Does anyone here know if it is still possible to setup mobile accounts on an external disk in BigSur? Wondering if you found a solution? We are experiencing this also

 

[sevoneone]

I never got it to work. I was able to get a prompt a couple of times, but the only option that appeared was the booth volume. Our use case was only 7 users. JumpCloud is free for up to 10 users/devices so I just ended up using that and some custom login/logout scripts. In the end, it is a good solution, but I still miss how dead simple things like this used to be on macOS. Seems like so much complexity and overhead for something as simple as just being able to have network users function the way you want. I actually considered getting a stack of external SSDs for awhile for each user to basically have their own boot drive and plug into whatever Mac they needed to use since it seemed it would be so easier all around.