FreeNAS hosting Mac home directories on Active Directory

[statalently]

Hi all, thanks for all the information posted in this forum so far, it has been invaluable.

I currently have our FreeNAS box serving SMB shares to a set of Macs (mostly Mojave), which are bound to a Windows Server 2019 Active Directory. I would like to have the users' home directories (Library, Desktop, Downloads, etc.) on a server so anyone on the AD can access their stuff from any Mac. I currently have the Windows AD hosting this, but performance and reliability are not very good, and we often fall into permissions and Keychain problems.

I followed this guide to test setting up my user with a home directory hosted on our FreeNAS:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/cifs-home-directories-in-ad-environment.27132/
...but I was unable to log in on the Mac.

The thread above is over four years old and was more targeted to Windows clients, Apple has recently made a move to SMB and is dropping AFP, and I read that there were some changes to the way AD works in FreeNAS 11. All that considered, does anyone have any updated information on serving home directories for Macs on AD?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to resolve this?

 

[statalently]

Were you able to resolve this?

I'm afraid not... We also tried Acronis on Windows to see if the Macs preferred AFP home dirs, but this gave us a lot of trouble mounting our SMB shares on the FreeNAS!
Another downside of hosting with Windows is that we are unable to use Mac's 'mobile user' setting, (working off a local copy of the home dir which is synced to a server) which would be the ideal way of working.
I would still appreciate any insight anyone can offer. I may test out using FreeNAS home dirs for Mac again - if I have any success, I will post my findings.