Tiburon Homes, LLC a leading home builder in Chicago’s affluent suburbs, uses mainly open source applications to keep it’s business running smoothly.  Using a combination of ClamWin Antivirus to protect it’s desktops from viruses and malware, Zimbra to run mission critical email, calendaring and scheduling, and TightVNC to provide remote desktop support, Tiburon has saved thousands hard costs such annual license renewals and in soft costs such as lost productivity due to unreliable proprietary products.

With a wealth of new features added to the upcoming release of Firefox, Mozilla has decided to skip calling it 3.1 and has gone right to 3.5.  Much of this is due to the increased scope of the project. A thrid beta was released today.  I’ve tried out the beta and it’s a wonderful piece of software.  Pages load quicker as does the program overall.  Things just seem much more responsive.  I can’t wait for Firefox 3.5 to be released!

Tiburon Homes, LLC has managed to avoid viruses such as Conficker and Vundo by using the free ClamAV software on their computers that run Windows XP.  ClamwinAV, the Windows version of the ClamAV, is a free and open source software package that has often rated higher than propriety products such as Symantec and McAfee.  Using a combination of ClamAV and Firefox, Tibuon has been able to keep their IT security high while keeping their costs low.

Tiburon Homes, a luxury home builder located in Hinsdale, Illinois has switched to Zimbra to provide it’s office with integrated email, calendaring, document management and project management.  By consolidating these services onto Zimbra, Tiburon realized a cost savings of $500 in the first 6 months.  What’s more, Zimbra has provided field personnel with the ability to sync their Blackberry and iPhones devices over-the-air for a fraction of the cost if they had gone with a proprietary solution like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.

It’s rare that you would ever want to migrate a Macintosh from one Active Directory domain to another forrest or sub-domain.  In most cases, one forrest or domain should be sufficient for any and all user management needs.  The only time I can think you might ever want to do there is some pressing security need or maybe if your company has acquired another company or division and it needs a new domain.

Apple Enterprise Support wasn’t much help on this and the normal tools you would use, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory Migration tool are of no help with the Macintosh computers and portable home directories on the machine.  The Enterprise engineer I spoke had never heard of anyone doing this and to his knowledge, no at Apple Enterprise Suppot had ever done anything more than an AD-to-OD or OD-to-AD migration.

Here is what I cobbled together to make this work:

AD Migration Process

1.  Have the client log out
2.  If the machine is 10.4 (Tiger), reboot and run applejack first to ensure a clean filesystem.
3.  Run the Microsoft AD Migration Tool using your Domain Admin account and set the user’s password.
4.  Run the script attached to this article to first unbind from old the domain and rebind to the new domain
Run the following through ARD or the Terminal as root
3a.  dscl . list /users ##List the users in order to find the short name
3b.  dscl . -delete /users/migrateduser  ##Deletes the local cached account without deleting the local home directory.  Note:  The lowercase users is not a typo.
3c.  killall loginwindow  ##Refreshes the login Window
3d.  chown -R migrateduser:NEWDOMAIN\users /Users/migrateduser  ##Recursively change the permissions on the local home directory to the user and the new domain group “users”
5. Login using “Other” as migrateduser and click “Create Mobile Account”
6. Verify the Desktop and Dock are as the client had previous to the migration

Leopard Shell Script to Bind to New Domain

Tiger Shell Script to Bind to New Domain