Introduction
mobilEcho includes the ability to automatically show a user's Active Directory assigned home folder in the mobilEcho client app. These home directory locations are specified as a Windows file share (SMB) UNC path in the user's Active Directory user account profile. When setting up home directories in mobilEcho, it is important to consider the topology of your mobilEcho deployment. mobilEcho includes a 'Network Reshare' feature, that allows a mobilEcho server to host a shared volume that gives access to data located on a second file server. The mobilEcho server uses the SMB/CIFS protocol to connect to the secondary file server. If mobilEcho is installed directly on the server hosting your users' Active Directory assigned SMB home folders, and a mobilEcho shared volume has been created with the same name and location as the SMB home folders shared volume, the mobilEcho UNC path to the home folders shared volume will be identical to the UNC path to the SMB home folders shared volume, and the UNC path specified in the user's Active Directory profile home folder setting will be correct for both SMB access and mobilEcho access. If you are using mobilEcho's Network Reshare feature to give access to home directories on a secondary SMB file server, the SMB UNC path in a user's Active Directory profile home folder setting will not match the mobilEcho UNC path, since mobilEcho servers access their home folders by connecting to a different server. In this case, you will need to configure a Network Reshare Path Mapping, so that mobilEcho knows how to translate the SMB UNC path it gets from the Active Directory profile home folder setting to the mobilEcho UNC path that the mobilEcho client needs to know to connect to the home folder.
Configuring a Network reshare path mapping
- Click Servers & Folders in the top menu.
- Click the Add new path mapping button.
- Select the mobilEcho server where the mobilEcho network reshare shared volume is located. Then enter the name of the mobilEcho Shared Volume.
- Click Next.
- Enter the UNC Path that you would like to be redirected to the mobilEcho Shared Volume you specified in the previous step.
- Click Save.
Important note on server names in AD path vs. Network reshare path mapping
Because mobilEcho is matching on this path, the UNC Path needs to use the exact server name and SMB shared volume name as it appears in your users' Active Directory user profile home folder setting. If an SMB home folder's path in Active Directory uses a different name for the server than is entered in the path mapping setting (such as "\\fileserver.company.com\sharename" vs. "\\fileserver\sharename") the home directory will not work in the mobilEcho client. If you've used more than one method for representing your server's name in the Active Directory profile home folder setting for your users, you will need to create a path mapping for each variation on the server name.