Article 1 – Mac Home Directories on Windows Servers
FIrst in a series
Organizations wanting to integrate Mac OS X systems into their Windows–based enterprise network will most likely want to also centralize the storage of user home directories on a Windows server to ensure proper data security and backup policies are applied. While Mac OS X provides support for using SMB to access Windows shares, the native AFP protocol has many advantages for Mac OS X systems, and Group Logic’s ExtremeZ-IP Server enables a Windows server to fully support AFP clients such as Mac OS X.
Centrify DirectControl joins the Mac OS X system to
Active Directory and provides the user authentication, manages the user’s UNIX
(Mac OS X) identity, sets up the Kerberos environment for SSO, and manages the
home directory path and mounting of network home directories. In this scenario,
we will use the AFP protocol to enable the user to access a Windows server for
the home directory since it offers many advantages over using the SMB protocol.