using dscl and automount to change OS X users home directory

Sat, 02/16/2008 - 14:09 — Mel Martin

I have 2 iMacs at home and wanted to cross mount /Users home directories to each other so my family can log into either and have their environment.

Using dscl and automount it's easy.

Good pointers for automount/autofs and dscl (not really good but better than nothing) help.

On the machine that you want to automount directories on, execute:

dscl -change Local/Default/Users/kate NFSHomeDirectory /Users/kate /home/kate

dscl will change the home directory of kate from the normal /Users/kate to /home/kate. This step readies for the use of the automounter.

Edit /etc/auto_home to look like:

#
# Automounter map for /home
#
+auto_home # Use directory service
kate dining-room.local:/Users/kate

This snippit will automagically mount the home directory on the dining-room machine onto the local /home/kate directory (it uses bonjour for host resolution and nfs for mounting).

After a bit of time ... poof the directory will be there when kate logs in locally (already created a local account for kate).

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