Thomas-M

Q: Mobile account configuration

What would be considered a default mobile configuration for a full mobile network home folder?

 

Ideally i want to configure it so that any user can use any mac on the network and be able to login with all their user data and configurations.

Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)

Posted on Apr 19, 2016 4:57 AM

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Q: Mobile account configuration

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  • by Strontium90,

    Strontium90 Strontium90 Apr 19, 2016 5:34 AM in response to Thomas-M
    Level 5 (4,077 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Apr 19, 2016 5:34 AM in response to Thomas-M

    This is called network home folders.  This is possible but it has a number of caveats.  First, if your users are content creators, the implementation of network home folders is pretty much a fail.  Large video and image files opened over the network is very challenging.  Many "professional" apps are not fully compatible with network home folder implementations.  Much can be overcome through folder redirection but you can not overcome a department of video professionals all working on massive files across a network.

     

    While schools can implement network home folders and be successful with wireless access, rarely are the students using mail clients or working on large files.  Educational usage and business usage are different.  In education your window of connection is usually less than an hour at a time and experiences periods of peak load (start and end of class when students login and logout in mass).  You need to ensure that you have a robust network infrastructure.  Your server should be link aggregated or connected via 10GigE.  Your storage also needs to be able to keep up with the iops, especially if you are using small files.  In a business implementation, the period of connection is expected to be at least 8 hours.  That is a long time to ensure no network errors or disruptions.


    As for a default mobile config, you can support network homes without Profile Manager.   All you need to do is define a network home share and then set the user's home folder to the net home mount.  That being said, the key configuration is cache folder redirection.  Without it, many of your applications will give you fits. 


    As an alternative, you can take a look at home folder synchronization.  This has its own baggage, but it will allow data to be on each machine and sync to a common location on the server.


    What type of work are your users doing?  Do you have a robust network and storage architecture?  How much data are you planning to support?


    Reid

    Apple Consultants Network

    Author - "El Capitan Server – Foundation Services"

    Author - "El Capitan Server – Control & Collaboration"

    Author - "El Capitan Server – Advanced Services"

    :: Exclusively available in Apple's iBooks Store



  • by Thomas-M,

    Thomas-M Thomas-M Apr 20, 2016 5:42 AM in response to Strontium90
    Level 1 (72 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Apr 20, 2016 5:42 AM in response to Strontium90

    Just basic computing, no large media work or anything along those lines. Tops 6-8 users that need to be able to use any Mac on the network.

    For the amount of users the network is robust and sufficient, storage architecture is along the lines of Pegasus 2 Thunderbolt in Raid 5 configuration at the server.

    Theoretical maximum of 500gb allowance per user but most Macs only have disk usage in the vicinity of 120-250GB. Really is SOHO type scenario.