Greg and I have been working on a way to automate adding an OS X workstation's binding to UVic's LDAP server. This would avoid the very finicky GUI application Directory Utility, which is frankly poorly designed and time consuming.

The goal

Auto magically do the following:

Bind to UVic's ldap server at ldap1p.uvic.ca with the following search base suffix:

• ou=People,dc=uvic,dc=ca

Configure Search and Mapping setting with the following customization from a modified RFC2307 template:

• Users > NFSHomeDirectory > #/Users/Netlink/$uid$
• Users > UserShell > #/bin/bash

Current Progress:

So the script found here and then modified by removing the plist for installs older OS X 10.7 partially works. It binds to ldap1p.uvic.ca but does not configure the search and mappings listed above. The Record Types and Attributes remain blank.

Moving forward we believe that dscl likely holds the key for completing the script and adding the necessary customization to the .plist.

This post will be updated as I move forward.