Migrating current mobile user accounts from one OS X Server to another

Question

I have not been able to find ANY answers to my situlaton. 
I have a small office that currently has a Mac Server 10.4.11 server running that has many "mobile user" accounts setup.  This was done because we have so many mobile users coming in and out of the office.  When the user comes back they sync their home directory witht th server here.  Works great.
We recently purchased a new Mac Server running 10.7.4.  Set it up as the Open Directory Master.  I unbind from the old server and bind to the new server.  Everything seems to be working just fine except when I go and add a current mobile user to the new server it creates a new user account on the client device (MacBooks) as if the previous user settings didn't exsist.  Since they need to be mobile users and not just network users I haven't been able to find a solution to this problem any where.
Is there a way on the client to tell it to use the old user account stored on the MacBook to use with new mobile user connected to the new server?
Or is there an easier way of doing this that I don't know about?
Thanks,
TK

Answer 1

If I understand what you wrote, no.  The reason is this.  If memory serves...  In 10.4.11 accounts were assigned a UID.  In 10.7.x, accounts are assigned a UID and a GUID.  Most everything relies on the GUID at this point.  So, what you have is an account named marysue on the workstation and it is assigned a UID like 1045.  Now you created marysue on the Lion server, but you likely did not recreate the UID to match the old server.  And thus, the UID value is different but more importantly you now have a GUID value like EC0F9357-8EF2-4D3B-B6F3-2E3016400114, that is associated with the account.  So, the user, despite having the same shortname, is different. 
In addition, you are working with two different directory systems.  10.4 still used NetInfo (ah, I miss you so).  10.5 and above use DS local flat files, even when bound to an LDAP system.
So, probably the easiest way to do this, provided I understand what you are seeing is the following.  Let's assume the following:
You have a mobile account on a workstation for the user maryjoe with a UID of 1034 that came from the 10.4.11 system.  You have this account cached.  You have a home folder in /Users/maryjoe.  You have now bound to the new server which contains a user named maryjoe likely with a UID of something other than 1034 and with a GUID value that likely did not exist in the old directory system, also with the shortname of maryjoe and a home path of /Users/maryjoe.
So when you log in, you are likely being pathed to /Users/maryjoe, but you are seeing a default Dock and no documents because of permissions.  My guess is that if you used Terminal to view the Users directory you would see something like this (open Terminal and issue the command ls -l /Users/:
drwxrwxrwt   4 root       wheel  136 Apr 18 21:35 Shared
drwxr-xr-x+ 14 locadmin  staff  476 Jan 21 7:42 locadmin
drwxr-xr-x+ 14 1034  staff  476 Mar 21 10:42 maryjoe
Note the folder maryjoe is not owned by maryjoe, it is owned by the UID of maryjoe from the old server.
Ok, so long story short (sorry for the log explanation, especially if you are experiencing something else that I did not get from the post), all you need to do is update the permissions of the home folder.  Do this:
1:  Log in as the local admin
2:  Open Terminal
3:  Issue this command:
     sudo chown -R maryjoe /Users/maryjoe
Even with a lot of data in the home folder, this should not take more than a few minutes to complete.
When the command completes, run this command again:  ls -l /Users/
You should now see
drwxrwxrwt   4 root       wheel  136 Apr 18 21:35 Shared
drwxr-xr-x+ 14 locadmin  staff  476 Jan 21 7:42 locadmin
drwxr-xr-x+ 14 maryjoe  staff  476 Mar 21 10:42 maryjoe
Now try logging in as the user.  With a little luck I divined the issue and this will have you up and running.  Now, I normally will also purge the cached account in /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/ but that might be a bit daunting.  So let's start with the simple process first of ensuring home folder permissions are correct.