Home Directory Auto Creation?

[mike_zaloudek]

We are migrating from an EMC Celerra and one of the features we liked was the Home Directories where it would search for the directory in the locations specified and create the folde if it did not exist. This really simplified the user home directory provisioning because we didn't need to create the folders or set permissions since the user could only map to their folder.

Reading though http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel73/html/ontap/filesag/accessing/task/t_oc_accs_managing_home_directories.html

I don't see if this is possible. Am I missing something or is this a feature EMC has that Netapp does not?

Celerra also allows you to specify the folder the user direstory belongs in. We would like to create 4 volumes and divide the users by the first letter in their userID:

UserVol1 (contains A-E)

UserVol2 (contains F-J)

UserVol3 (contains K-Q)

UserVol4 (contains R-Z)

Are we stuck creating a manual scripting process to achieve this?

[ekashpureff]

Data ONTAP won't creat the directory, but it can provide an auto home share.

See the File Access Protocols Guide in your documention.

I hope this response has been helpful to you.

At your service,

Eugene E. Kashpureff
ekashp@kashpureff.org
Fastlane NetApp Instructor and Independent Consultant
http://www.fastlaneus.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekashpureff

(P.S. I appreciate points for helpful or correct answers.)

[danekantner]

I realize this is old but if anyone stumbles upon... I use the DataOnTap powershell add-on to script auto creation of Home dir shares in NetApp. (Automaticaly works for employee moving to new shares as well, though I don't migrate data automatically).  My script is here:

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/NetApp-new-user-auto-9efa1918

By default I poll the filer for which volume matching Users* has the most available free space, but I added a flag in to set that will switch it to use a regex lookup matching the first letter to a pattern of [0-f] to users1 [g-m] to users2 [n-s] to users3 etc.,, so Jdoe would be would land on volume users2 for example.  This is what you're asking for... Just set the flag at the top to true (in the parameters, which are all commented to explain), and then around line 269 manually modify the regex patterns to match your use case, and more importantly to match the actual volume names needed.

I run this with a scheduled task every 5 minutes, so after an account is created in Active Directory by the helpdesk, the directory and share itself follows suit almost immediately.

This is explicitly creating shares for the user with the specified name, which generally is the NT ID but does not have to be.  If you're using the built in NT login ID matching you could eliminate about 1/2 the script or just comment out the add-nashare line that actually tries to create the share.