So after a couple of people requested this on the MacEnterprise mailing list….
This is a really simple AppleScript Studio application that allows you to create a Mobile User Account with a local home directory other than “/Users/nigelkersten”.

To get started….
- Open up the Xcode project.
- Edit “ldapDomain” and “pathToHomes” to reflect your LDAP domain and where you want the home directories to go to.
- Make sure you leave the trailing slash in for ‘pathToHomes’, otherwise you’ll end up with home directories like: “/Volumes/Storage/Usersnigelkersten”
- Compile it and run it.
When you launch it, it will spend a few seconds collecting usernames so that you can auto-complete the combo box.
I’ve left a grep statement in there to illustrate how you can filter out unwanted usernames:
do shell script "dscl " & ldapDomain & " -list /Users | egrep -v '^(z|Z)[0-9]{7}' |egrep -v '^vpn_*' | grep -v admin > /tmp/ldapusers.txt"
the section:
egrep -v '^(z|Z)[0-9]{7}' filters out our student ids, which are ‘z’ followed by 7 numbers.
If you wanted to pull that filter out, just change it to:
do shell script "dscl " & ldapDomain & " -list /Users | egrep -v '^vpn_*' | grep -v admin > /tmp/ldapusers.txt"
and the same goes for the other filters, which remove admin accounts in my area and the vpn user accounts that get created.
No guarantees about this app. It’s a rather quick and dirty hack, and you’re welcome to do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate seeing any improvements you make to it however.
In Leopard, mcxd.app does not exist. Not sure what replaces it. Do you know?
set shellCode to “/System/Library/CoreServices/mcxd.app/Contents/Resources/MCXCacher -U ” & newMobileUsername & ” -h ” & pathToHomes & newMobileUsername & ” && createhomedir -c -u ” & newMobileUsername
Fails with a command not found. Any pointers an I will make change to code an send you the fix.
Have a look at:
/System/Library/CoreServices/ManagedClient.app/Contents/Resources/createmobileaccount
It’s really quite nice :)
I thought I was smart after answering the product question.
I need help migrating people off the Macintosh network home directory structure back to the local Macintosh. Any procedures anywhere? Thanks