Connecting Mac (clients) to Network Home Folder (via MacOS Server 5.8 Policy Manager / Synology)

For years Apple has made changes which have made using network home folders less and less feasible. It is now effectively impossible due to the many, many issues.

I do not recall an official statement from Apple regarding network home directories but all Mac admins I know long gave up. :(

PHD - Portable Home Directories was some time ago officially discontinued. With this when you login on a client Mac it syncs a copy of the users home directory to the client Mac. This was always notorious for syncing problems and Apple discontinued it rather than fixing it.

Mobile accounts however still in theory exist. With this when you login for the first time on a client Mac a user account should be created with the same credentials as defined on the LDAP server and an empty new local home directory created for that user.

Most of your post seems to be describing using a network home directory.

An old separate issue is/was the way Microsoft Office for Mac handled creating and storing temporary files for users whilst they were editing documents stored on a network file server. This as I recall was not related to network home directories or mobile accounts etc. but purely a 'traditional' file server use. Office did (does?) create an invisible folder at the root of the network share called .TemporaryItems inside of which a sub-folder is created for each user. Each user needs to have a unique UID value and this needs to match between the file server and the client computer. If your using network logins with network home directories or using mobile accounts this should be the case.

However apparently the default permissions for this folder may be wrong. It maybe that this folder might not have even been created due to the permissions on the root of the network share. You would need to do the following on the file server itself.

cd /path/to/root/of/share

ls -la

If there is no .TemporaryItems folder listed then do

sudo mkdir .TemporaryItems

To create one and then do (regardless)

sudo chmod 1777 .TemporaryItems

There are far too many issues with network home directories for me to list here. As a couple of major examples the users Local Items keychain is stored in a folder named after the client Macs UUID value. If the user logs in from a different Mac then the UUID will be different and this keychain will not be accessible and hence unusable. This keychain is used by Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Safari. The other major issue is that SQLite the simple database software is used these days by Apple to store many settings and related information. SQLite hates accessing its files via a network share and will often corrupt them. - Guess what? The Local Items keychain is also a SQLite database!