Mac and OpenLDAP: Local homes for network users

I wanted a Mac to authenticate users against our Debian OpenLDAP server, but to create a local home directory on the Mac (see here for more details). The usual configuration for network users on the Mac is to mount their homes from the server over NFS. There are many excellent instructions on the net on how to do that. But finding help on how to have them use a local home instead was much more difficult.

It turns out it can be done very simply, by disabling one line in /etc/auto_master on the Mac. By default, it contains +auto_master, which tells the Mac's automounter to look for an automount map in LDAP. If this line is disabled, the Mac will create a local home for network users the first time they log in. Since our userHomes in LDAP are defined as /home/username, the Mac home is created under /home instead of /Users, which is fine.

So for such a setup, you do NOT need to import an Apple schema into your LDAP directory. (That was quite a hassle because you need to tweak the original schema which is not quite kosher; but it was unnecessary).

All you need to do is comment out this single line in /etc/auto_master to make it

#+auto_master  # Use directory service

Or copy/paste this:

sudo perl -i.orig -pe 's/^(\+auto_master.*)/## $1/' /etc/auto_master

Kill the Final Cut registration screen

I came across this nicely detailed post explaining how to get rid of the forced registration screen of Final Cut Pro/Studio, which always pops up when you really don't want to be bothered with this idiocy.

But I felt the solution was worse than the problem. It involved far too much clicking around for my taste. And you need the Property List Editor. You only have that once you have installed over 1 GB (!!) of developer tools. If you can remember where you put your OS X disk, that is.

Surely, there must be a better way to do it, by just copying a command from some web page and pasting it into Terminal?

It turned out to be 3 commands. And getting them right was much worse than the solution I din't like. You need your machine ID, which is in an XML file that defaults read doesn't want to read. And in that file it is encoded in Base64. You need to put this ID into a property list file as data. That can be done with defaults write, but the data needs to be in hex. I should just have registered, I guess...

Anyway, the detailed explanations are in the link of the first sentence, and the 3 ridiculous commands to paste into Terminal are here:

id=$(perl -MMIME::Base64 -ne '/^\s+(\S{64})\s*$/ && print unpack("H*",decode_base64($1));' "/Library/Application Support/ProApps/Final Cut Studio System ID"|tail -1)
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RegFinalCutStudio "{ AECoreTechRegister=1; AECoreTechRegSent=1; }"
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RegFinalCutStudio AECoreTechRegInfo -data "$id"