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1. Mac OS X Servers in an Active Directory Infrastructure

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Active Directory on Mac is a way of describing the process of connecting a machine running macOS to Active Directory on a Windows server. Connecting a Mac to Active Directory is known as ‘binding’ and once completed, allows the Mac to access many of the same services, including a single user id and password, as Windows machines on the network. In the OS X Directory Utility, Click OK, and move to the Directory Servers view – is all is well then the domain name will be listed along with a comment that the server is responding normally: Active Directory/All Domains should also have been added to the Authentication and Contacts views in the Search Policy. Dec 12, 2019 Microsoft never designed AD to support Macs in the same way as Windows, nor are they interested in doing so. As the IT world shifts away from Windows to macOS® and Linux®, a significant number of IT admins want to know the best practices for integrating Macs with Active Directory. Mac Management with Active Directory Falls Short.

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Mac OS X Servers in an Active Directory Infrastructure

Like Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server can be bound to an Active Directory domain. This approach gives you the option of offering Mac and Windows resources using accounts stored in Active Directory. To bind the server to Active Directory, use the Active Directory plug-in in the Directory Access utility. Simply enter the appropriate information and click the Bind button (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Configuration sheet for Apple's Active Directory plug-in in the Directory Access utility.

Once Mac OS X Server is bound to Active Directory, you'll be able to use Workgroup Manager to configure share points and select users and groups from the Active Directory domain for assigning ownership and access permissions to those share points. Likewise with configuring print queues in Server Admin. Apple mac os x 10.3 panther download.

There are a number of advanced options that you can configure in Directory Access to set how Mac OS X interacts with Active Directory. Many of these are more relevant for Mac OS X workstations than for servers (in particular, how home directories are accessed) and should be set on the Mac OS X workstations that will also be bound to Active Directory, rather than on the server.

The Mappings tab, however, is important to configure. Open Directory and Active Directory share few user-record attributes (username and password being two). There is no direct Active Directory equivalent to the UID number that the Mac file system uses to assign ownership and access to files. By default, Apple's Active Directory plug-in will create a UID number based on the GUID attribute in the user's Active Directory account and the MAC address of the workstation's Ethernet port where the user has logged in. While this is an effective solution in an environment with only Windows servers (which don't use the UID to assign ownership or access to resources), it doesn't work well in a mixed-server environment because the UID for a user will change depending on the workstation at which the user logs in. This means that a Mac OS X server won't be able to properly assign that user's permissions.

The solution is to map the UID to some other attribute in Active Directory. The easiest solution is to pick an unused field (such as a phone number or portion of the address or location field) and enter UIDs manually in the field when creating user accounts (ensuring that each is unique). The Mappings tab in the Directory Access utility allows you to specify which attribute is to be used (mapped) for this purpose. You can also extend the Active Directory schema to include a UID attribute. The Mappings tab also allows you to specify a primary group and additional group IDs (which are not as critical as assigning the UID).

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Active Directory For Mac Os X Servers

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We recently had a call from a school running a suite of iMacs on macOS Mojave 10.14.6.

As is often the case, the previous Mac consultant had retired or disappeared for some other reason. This left the client without a solution provider to manage ongoing upgrades and Mac system maintenance.

The client called us because, after a recent re-image of their base macOS system, they noticed that students could suddenly access each other’s files on the main server.

Knowing very well that a group of teenagers would very quickly find 1000 practical jokes of varying degrees of offensiveness, taking advantage of this permissions problem, we were asked to fix the issue as quickly as possible.

Findings

Active Directory For Mac Os X Server Windows 10

It turns out that all the student home folders were kept inside a single shared folder on the Windows server, which is fairly typical. The Macs were bound to Active Directory in the usual way though System Preferences > Users and Group > Login Options (which essentially is a quick setup that might otherwise require the Directory Utility app for more complex environments).

When a student logged into the Mac with their Active Directory credentials, they would see not only their network home folder mounted on the desktop (this was auto-mounted using a login script) but would ALSO see the parent folder, containing all the other students’ home folders.

It didn’t take long to notice that a given student could access those other students’ home folders. Adobe illustrator cs6 download mac.

Mac Os X Active Directory

Active Directory binding

Os X Active Directory

After some rummaging around, we noticed that the DeployStudio image being used had a checkbox relating to the Active Directory binding, which would usually only be visible in the Directory Utility app, if you were to interrogate the settings of the AD binding. The checkbox says “Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location”.

With this box checked, the macOS client was retrieving a path to the student home folder parent directory, which was being defined by the AD server, and automatically mounting it. As such, any student could easily browse to other student’s home folders. Simply unticking this box on each of the macOS client machines stopped this behaviour from happening.

However, this wasn’t the end of the story. It occurred to us that really, even if the student couldn’t see their peers’ home folders, there must still be a permissions issue. If a student happened to know the network path to type in, not too difficult, they could in theory still access other students’ folders if they have permission. So, what was going on?

Further investigation

After some investigation it transpired that the IT company who managed the Active Directory infrastructure was using Group Policy restrictions to disallow Windows PC users from browsing each others’ home folders. This was working quite effectively on Windows.However, GPO does not apply to macOS workstations and this was masking an underlying issue where the user home folders were not having the correct permissions set on them.

You might reasonably expect a student to own their home folder and its contents, with staff members able to read/write, but nobody else able to access it. In our case, the permissions were being inherited very erratically such that most students could access each others’ folders due to a very open read/write permission on the parent folder. But the Windows-centric IT provider was using Group Policy to prevent unauthorised access, rather than getting the core permissions right in the first place, thus masking an underlying problem.

Summary

So, two points to take home here. Firstly, make sure if you’re in a mixed macOS and Windows environment that your Windows file server permissions are kosher and set correctly. Don’t rely on Group Policy to manage access restrictions in a mixed environment. If you struggle to get the permissions and inheritance formula right, you probably need to consider restructuring your folders to make your job easier. Secondly, remember the UNC Path checkbox on macOS bindings will, often, mount the parent folder of your network homes in addition to the user’s home folder itself (depending on your specific AD setup). This may or may not be desirable behaviour, but it’s easy to control if you know how.