Network Users with network homes not really working for me

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Level 1

14 points

Network Users with network homes not really working for me

I have with great pain setup a OS X Lion server on a Mac Mini that was supposed to be my central server to have 4 network users accounts and all the users data is stored on an external disk array with mounted network homes to the 2 iMacs and 2 Macbooks I have in my home.

I have gotten it all working and all my Macs are joined to the Open Directory and each User can login as a network users on any of the Macs and get their files via mounted home directory from the server. The home directories on the server are backed up with Time Machine.

I have found the following items that do not work proberly:

1) Desktop backgrounds settings are just lost sometimes for whatever reason. Desktop background goes to default and you need to manually set back to the one you have selected. This happen mostly if users have their own desktop pictures.

2) Keychain get's screwed up. The user often get the "Keychain doesn't exist to store ..." message and need to select to reset the keychain. Anything I have tried from "Keychain First Aid" to removing and have a new one created doesn't fix the problem. It keeps on coming back.

3) iTunes Storage and AppStore are getting confused about authorized computers. This is because a user logs in from another computer and then iTunes store would tell the user this computer hasn't been authorized to play the purchase music. Same happens with iPhone apps from the AppStore. Apparently those two stores are not setup to hanlde network users proberly.

4) Permission issues happen sometimes in Application like iPhoto where it would complain not being able to see photos or cannot add new photos to the library. Need to run a permission repair on the Iphoto Library to fix this.

5) One critical one is that it's not really possible to restore files from Time Machine. The Time Machine backup is done on the server by an administrator account directly backing up the user directories. When you go into Time Machine on the server even the admin can drill down into the user directories so no restore possible. The individual users have no idea that there was ever a Time Machine backup done as Time Machine is not setup in their accounts on the individual Macs. This prevents any possible restore.

I reckon that many of the problems are related to having only one location for ~/Library as the individual Macs are writing their user related settings into this directory in a central location. So what happens is when something on iMac 1 and then I log in on iMac 2 that might not exactly match this Macs config and it get's confused throwing one of the above erors.

Trouble is witth central network home directory the way they mounted i can't exclude the ~/Library folder. The only option I can see is mobile account because I have seen in the preferences that when they sync the handle Library items differently.

Does anybody have any experience out there with this sort of thing and can advise what's the best way forward?

If i can't resolve this I'll go back to have network users with local home directories on each Mac and just setup for each user a network share to which they copy files if they want them available on other Macs. Not as nice but at least it works!

As a said note I did this to make things easier but it has up to now cost me trouble then i had before!

Posted on Oct 3, 2011 12:55 AM

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Answer 1

aschmid Author

Level 1

14 points

Oct 3, 2011 1:40 AM in response to aschmid

Forgot one more:

6) Deleting something will not put it in the Trash as usual but delete it completely as there is nothing like a "Network Trash" hence the file is deleted from a network file share which means it's not going into the local trash but it's deleted completely.

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Answer 2

aschmid Author

Level 1

14 points

Oct 10, 2011 2:32 AM in response to aschmid

Haven't heard anything from anybody so probably to daunting a topic ...

I have now moved on to try Portable Home Directories (PHD) and syncing ... what a disaster!

First it took me ages to get this right as the way the home directores are mounted on the clients from the server it's just weired which has to do with how AFP mounts are implemented. Since one AFP mount can't be mounted by several users on the same system they use a workaround of mounting it to a temp directory and then linking it back to where it should be. Of course this causes major problems.

Okay it kind of worked so let's move on to syncing PHD. First of all on initial creation it only sync a small portion of the directory that should be okay but on some of my accounts it never went passed this stage. It said it's all synced but it only had synced the first 10% or so of the data. I wasn't able to make it sync anymore.

On other accounts it correctly synced all the data down, or so I thought. Apparently a few sync session back and forth and 50-60% of the data was gone. On further investigation it turned out to be iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Turns out does don't sync probably via Home Sync!!!

Apple product is not able to probably syncing Apple specific library files!!!!

So here my warning to everybody: DO NOT USE PHD and HOME SYNC to sync your data as you will lose stuff if you have iTunes and/or iPhoto libraries with Lion OS X Server!!!

The whole Lion Server experience has been a disaster for me. Now I have a server that does file sharing and time machine backup sharing. I can do the same thing with a standard Mac using those services. What's the point of Lion Sever for Home if nothing works proberly?

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Answer 3

jjasper

Level 1

15 points

Oct 10, 2011 3:37 PM in response to aschmid

Yeah I am seeing some strangeness myself. If I log into my network home from a 10.6 box to my 10.7 Server all is well. If I log in from a 10.7 client 90% of the time the Dock trash does not work. It wants to either delete before being put into the trash like when you delete from a network share or sometimes things go in the Trash but are not visible unless you navigate to your .Trash folder so I have to delete them from the command line. And other times it works as normal. The Trash has gone insane depending on where the original file lives and how it is moved into the Trash.

A LOT of applications are working fine as a 10.7 local user, 10.6 network user, but not working as a 10.7 network user including Apple's own Motion, and Compressor which seem to be related to Qmaster. I am thinking because of the hidden flag on ~/Library they are having trouble creating their prefs or files in Application Support. Changing the hidden flag to nohidden does not resolve the issue though. It might be too the the Apps are not getting fed the correct Library location (and Trash location). What is many apps are running fine. So once again troubleshooting is difficult.

Wiki and Calendar are working great for me the the new Web caldendar is simply awesome. Software Update Server is also working well. I use hosted email so not using server for that but happy to see they adopted Roundcube for the web interface. The Admin tools are pretty disjointed and a lot of things are harder because they are missing or must be done from the CLI.

Most of my server the upgrade went smooth, but Open Directory has to be rebuilt from scratch after trying upgrades and imports and all kinds of voodoo, not fun with 50+ users.

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Answer 4

jjasper

Level 1

15 points

Oct 17, 2011 11:28 AM in response to jjasper

10.72 updates to both client and server fixed most of my ills. Funny enough now stuff actually can be moved into the dock trash and shows up in the trash can but emptying does not work unless I do a secure empty trash. Much better than before but not perfect.

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Answer 5

Kimbakat

Level 1

69 points

Apr 20, 2012 1:08 PM in response to aschmid

Same here.

Runnin 10.7.3 server (latest combo update) I have lion on one machine and snow leop on another machine.

They both login to the same account. Got the network home folder thing working. It recognizes the users' network home folder. That gave me some grief setting that up and getting it right.

The Snow Leopard logs in super fast.

The Lion machine logs in really slow..had keychain issue here and desktop is different picture.

So on Lion machine, to test the "mobile" accounting syncing during startup and logoff...I created a test text file and put it in the Documents folder which should be on the server. Logged off then went to the Sno machine to see if my file was in the documents folder.

No. Not there..so there is no synching of the mobile networked accounts during log in and log off.

This is not good. A home folder on the server should have all the folders that a local home user folder should have. It should be an exact duplicate. This is where I see iTunes and Time Machine and other apps getting confused with the local machine info... while you really need the remote home network account folder to be what it's using.

Big Problem!!!

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