Mobile Home

Yes it will work. Create network home folders for everyone. Then when they are logged in on their primary machine, go to system preferences->accounts and create mobile home folder.

Nice thing about mobile homes is when you get new hardware, it's one step to replicate a new home folder onto the new machine.

Downside of mobile homes is that some users can be exasperated by the login and logout sync processes. If they skip those (by putting machine to sleep instead of logging out) then some preference files don't get replicated.

1. I don't think you'd want to do that. If you set it with profile manager, then that setting would apply at every machine they sat down at. You'd have replicas all over the place on every machine. Probably not what you desire.

2. Not sure. AFP server can kick off idle or sleeping users, but I suspect this feature doesn't trigger the mobile home logout process.

ajm_from_WA wrote:

Couple more questions:

1. Possible to set it up with Profile manager so that their mobile home is only created on the computers I designate?

2. Possible to set up their user accounts so that they automatically log out (and sync?) after a certain period of inactivity?

You can do this with MCX (Managed Preferences). You would create two or more computer groups, for one you would set it to create mobile accounts, for the other you would not. Depending on which computer group the computer is a member of will dictate whether a mobile account is created when the user logs in. Sync preferences would be defined the same way.

I would NOT recommend network user accounts with mobile home sync for any user that is going to use more than the one computer to login with… if that's what you mean by "mobile home". There are too many circumstances where sync timings and things like path differences can lead to unexpected behaviours and even data loss. If you're talking about standard network user accounts where the account resides on the server then this will work just fine.

Network user accounts with mobile home sync is perfect for laptop users. They use their laptop and only their laptop where they can come and go from the office as they please. Mobile home sync provides them with a local copy of their account so that their environment is preserved when they don't have access to the server. It works just like any any other local user account other than it syncs periodically, or not, with the corresponding network user account on the server the laptop is bound with. The ONLY time the mbile account on the laptop matches what is on the server is after a logout sync. At no other time are they identical (even then they're not but it's close enough to not cause data issues).

Network user account however have only the one copy of the account… on the server. Because of this a user can log in and out of their account from any computer they choose.

FWIW I use a network user account with mobile home sync for my own user account on an rMBP.