THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE APPLIES TO:
- EFT Server (All Versions)
QUESTION
If you select the check box that says “automatically create home folder for newly added users” for a site that uses AD authentication, what happens to the user account? The user has a home folder already defined in AD, so why does the Site builder wizard offer an option to create a home folder?
ANSWER
The hierarchy in EFT Administrator is Server Group > Server > Site > User Setting Level > User. When you define a Site, a folder for the Site and the Default User Setting Level is added to the /EFTRoot/ directory. When the Auto assign home folders to newly created users check box is selected, each user account that is created on the Site will have a home folder added as a subfolder of /Usr/ (by default, C:\InetPub\EFTRoot\MySite\Usr).
For example, suppose you have a User Setting Level called Power Users and created a home folder of /Usr/Power Users in the Virtual File System (VFS). When you right-click the User Setting Level Power Users, and create a new user jsmith, this new jsmith account is generated with a home folder in the VFS in the path /Usr/Power Users/jsmith. This is the default behavior when creating a user within EFT Administrator; however, a super-administrator account can always override/change that behavior when the Site is created. (You must manually create the folder for the User Setting Level; it is not created automatically when you create the new User Setting Level.)
If the user is created using the COM interface, or the user appears in the EFT Server list as a result of Active Directory, LDAP, or ODBC querying the user account list in real-time and finding out that it is a valid user but not yet added to EFT Server, then a home folder is added as a subfolder of the home folder for the User Setting Level to which the user is added.
For Sites that use NTLM/AD authentication, if the user account has a "Home Folder" defined by the AD administrator, then the VFS will not create a physical folder for the new user, but instead creates a virtual folder that points to the path specified in Active Directory for the home folder for that user (sometimes called a "roaming profile"). Therefore, if jsmith exists on the AD controller as a valid user with a home folder mapped to \\192.168.20.19\common_file_share\jsmith, then when jsmith becomes a new user on EFT Server (using the same pathing/settings level from the above example), then jsmith will be assigned the home folder /usr/Power Users/jsmith, which is a virtual folder pointing to \\192.168.20.19\common_file_share\jsmith.
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