Moving accounts from Snow Leopard Macs to Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server

Question

I got my brand spanking new Mac mini today with Snow Leopard Server! So far, we (at home) were managing our accounts on individual iMacs and a MacBook Pro. While I will be getting into the innards of account migration, management etc. I thought I'd post a quick question here; Currently I have an iMac with three user accounts on it (wife and two kids). I also have my own personal MacBook Pro with my account (the only Admin account) on it. We'll soon be getting another iMac for our daughter (who currently has an account on the existing iMac). My idea in getting the Mac mini was to move to and centrally manage all the user accounts in the household on the Mac mini server. What is the best way to accomplish this? What is the best way to move the existing accounts on to the server?
Additionally, I'll be looking into connecting the two stationary iMacs with Powerline Ethernet (where one runs Ethernet over existing electrical wires in the walls). My other option would be to rely on wireless network (I don't think this would be a good idea for if I am going to be placing the user accounts on the server and there needs to be a constant on, reliable connection between the server and the client computers as they will be talking to each other a lot!). Any thoughts on Powerline? (I am not looking forward to installing Ethernet cabling behind walls :o))
What say the wise men of Mactopia?!
Thanks,
Kenneth.
P.S. I had earlier accidentally posted this in the corresponding section of Mac OS X instead of the Mac OS X Server forum.

Answer 1

Ok so the esiest way to explain this is to tell you what i just went through.
I have 3 user accounts. All the accounts are network Users meaning that there home folder are kept on the server. I was having a problem with Time Machine giving me error 41 and error 11. After scratching my head for 2 days I ended up copying (Drag-n-Drop) the Home Folders to an External Hard Drive. I then proceeded to erase both of the internal hard drives on the mac mini and did a fresh local install of the Server OS.
Everything was fine at that point. Now this is where Snow Leopard stopped being nice.
I went and Created the user account again using WGM. I let WGW create the home folder and the 9 folder inside. I made sure the short names were the same and the passwords were the same as they were previously.
However, once i Copied files from the external drive to the home folders the permissions copied as well, Which i guess should be expected. So now at this point apparently the UID's of the newly created users wasn't the same as they were before the clean install. I have multiple instances of root listed in the ACL for several folders and also had several instances of System listed sporadically.
Now, This isn't to say that you can't drag n drop because now That I have it all squared away and everything is now working ok, I would probably still drag n drop the home folder off to an external disk, but only because I now know what to do to clean things up.
if you drag and drop be sure to use the CHOWN command and theCHMOD commands afterwards. Take a look at this MacFixIt article: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20013630-263.html?tag=mncol;title
If you copy your local imac users to the home directory on the server you may want to follow the steps on the URL I gave plus you will most likely also have to do the following. In a nutshell you are going to use the chmod command to strip all the ACL Permissions then you are going to use the chown command to re-specify the correct owner and the correct permissions for the network user.
!) Go into ServerAdmin and click on Sharing
2) Go to the users folder you are using and select the user you are going to work with.
3) Click on the Permissions option
4) click on the +sign at the bottom (this will open the users & groups list to the right)
5) Drag the current user from the users list to the owner permissions line under posix section
5a) Click Save
6) Click on the Gear button at the bottom
7) Check the box for Owner Name and Owner Permissions.
8) Uncheck the box for Access Control List then click ok
Once you've gone through that rigmarole you can go back into ServerAdmin and fix the permissions for public and Sites folder which should only take a minute or so.
So the moral of this story and as I found out when i ended up calling Enterprise support is that the act of dragging and dropping user home directories from one server to another, or as in your case, from a local machine to a the server isn't anything that apple recommends or supports. you might want to read through the man pages for "Ditto" or so apple tells me, but honestly now that you know, the steps above aren't all that bad. It's true Knowing IS half the battle!
have Fun!
P.S. FWIW If you run into problems and have to call Enterprise Support be prepared for them to tell you to refer to the user Guides. So reading those would be to your advantage even though they aren't the easiest things to understand unlike apple's consumer products user guides