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Level 2

279 points

Portable Home Directories in 10.8 Server?

I have a Mac mini Server running 10.6.8. Now that 10.8 is out, Apple will probably stop supporting 10.6 (as is their policy) and that means either slowly eroding security or moving to 10.8. I have been looking at the documentation and it seems underneath it all is still by an large the same basic unix-stuff like postfix, dovecot, a dns system, etc. Giving the lack of support for GUI-managing the more complex setups, I'll probably be doing it command-line (stuff like multiple virtual mail domains, multiple web domains, etc.). Not fun (and a business opportunity for some enterprising software engineer).

But what I haven't been able to see in the documentation or anywhere else is Portable Home Directories. In my current setup, I have a 10.6.8 Server and 10.7 clients. On these clients is a single local administrator acocunt and the rest are 'managed mobile accounts'. These are local acocunts. They work when away form the network on which the server is, but when in range of the server, the server may push settings and stuff. And on login/logout and when connected to the LAN and during work, the home directory of the user is constantly synchronized with a copy of the user's home directory on the server. This means my users can take any computer and get their own account and a synchronized copy of their home directory. They can also take a laptop off line for a while and when they return to my LAN (either physically or by VPN), any changes will be synced. This is a sweet setup and it works with 10.7 clients and 10.6.8 server.

But what I haven't been able to find if this will still work with 10.8 Server. I have looked at teh 10.8 Server documentation and haven't found anything about it. Will it still work somehow and if not, is there a good alternative?

2010 iMac 27" i7, 2009 MBA SSD, 2010 mini server, NeXTdimension Cube

Posted on Jul 29, 2012 1:48 PM

Best reply

DenisF

Level 2

153 points

Posted on Jul 29, 2012 2:28 PM

Yes, I have done it.

You don't need to use terminal.

I think it works as before.

Probably it can be configured by profile manager but I have not been so far. What I have done is:

Create local network users on the server.

Go to the client. You need an administrator password.

In the preference users and groups go to the Option and enable network account server.

Each user can change its account to mobile user and configure what has to be synchronised and when.

View in context

36 replies

Nov 18, 2012 8:00 AM in response to Bradley Olwin

Bradley

Thanks for the input. Very much appreciated.

I had indeed set up a trust between the laptop and the server (more through persistence, the help of this forum, and dumb luck than actual know-how on my part). See attached image:

(not sure why it shows two certificates and two settings for each of Remote Mangement, Settings, and Trust Profile -- can you explain?)

I was still having no luck getting mobile accounts setup. I called Apple Enterprise support. They reviewed my setup, and could find anything wrong in the basic server setup. They then stepped me through the process of setting up mobile home directories using the web interface. It appeared we could push a "payload" to the client from the server, but could not get any network user to synchronize (the user would appear as a login option, buy little "double-house" icon at the top of the screen always showed a "!"):

Support tech was very helpful, but very stumped! He called in his upper level support, who looked at the situation and determined a gremlin was at fault. Since my server had no data on it, he advised that I reinstall the the OS and the Server App, and then set things up from scratch. I've gone through the process of reloading the OS. Before I try to attack it any further, should I erase all of the "profile" information on the client machine (see the image above)?

Also, should I go into to the Users and Groups on the client machine and remove my server as the directory server so that nothing gets confused (see screen shot below)?

Any advice is appreciated

Kirk

mille1j

Level 1

8 points

Nov 19, 2012 8:56 AM in response to Kirk Carver

I gave up on portable home directories. all my users were getting sync errors all the time and could never figure out whether to use the network account or the portable account to sync from . it was a disaster

jlorre

Level 1

0 points

Dec 19, 2012 9:46 AM in response to Gerben Wierda

@ gerben wierda,

hello Gerben, I have tried out portable home directories on 10.6.8 server and clients and it was a complete failure.

The implementation is not industrial grade. It works for a while, and then suddenly it does'nt. It's too fragile.

What's more, there is no decent up-to-date documentation for it, and the implementation of PHD is also not well documented, (and i searched for weeks) This lack of documentation makes it difficult to understand or remedy the problems when things go wrong.

In the end I have thrown PHD completely out of the window. Honnestly, we need stuff that is more reliable than that. So my guess is that apple will not very mucht promote PHD before they can get it to work in a more robust way. I've reverted to batch-synchronise directories with synchronize_pro_x, but also that is not always satisfying.

I also have used it to fix problems when things go wrong with portable home directories.

mille1j

Level 1

8 points

Dec 21, 2012 7:23 AM in response to jlorre

I turned off all portable home directories on ML 10.7.2 server. Over the next 2 weeks, users started having increasing problems with their accounts and I ultimately had to create entirely new accounts for all my users. It seems the users lib folders were just a catastrophe.

Jan 8, 2014 5:18 AM in response to Eric.

I got it working generally, but just cannot get HOME Folders to work/snyc or get the ICON to appear on the Users Menu Bar :-(

Help please Guru's !

Jan 10, 2014 7:04 PM in response to James Rothschild

When you say you cant get it to work? do you have more details....?

Also yes Portable home directories can be tricky. I try to train my users when a sync error occure to say use the most recent modification date and to use that for all future issues. Then no more sync errors unless a document is open when trying to sync... cant get away from that. except not to sync in background or trap files that use file locking IE excel.....

Also here is the option for the menu bar did you make sure you have this selected in your profile?

Portable Home Directories in 10.8 Server?