Network home structure vs portable home structure

I have two principle groups: Faculty and Students.
I wish to use portable homes with the faculty, and just network homes for the students (as there is just too much support issues with portable homes with the students)
The portable home structure needs to mirror the structure of the faculty's local home. But I would prefer not to have the student's network home look like their local home. (as they will get the network home confused with their local home). I understand that I can alter the template (/System/Library/UserTemplate/) which defines what the network home will look like, but I believe this will alter the structure of any portable homes which are created for the faculty as well.
Is there any means of having two different templates, one for use with portable homes, and one for use with network (non-portable) homes?

Not to be a "wet blanket" here, but are you sure you want students to have network homes?
Our system is set up with faculty using either PHD or Network homes depending on their computer type (laptop users get the PHD, desktop users network homes). Students are authenticated to be able to log into the system, but they don't get any kind of network home.
We provide a SAN that students can save work to, but it is completely erased each semester. The lab computers are also imaged at least once a semester, so anything that a student saves there is also deleted.
The reason is simple: storage space. With 400 students working on 24 computers, it would quickly become a data nightmare. Imagine if each of those students had just 10 gigs of storage online (that would be about 4 terabytes if my math is correct).
Now as far as templates, you can mostly accomplish this through Workgroup manager. Create groups and set whatever preferences you wish. It is a little trickier if you are also bound to Active Directory, but still possible.

Similar Messages

Safari and Server Admin slow to launch on a Network Home Directory

I have an issue with Safari and Server Admin that started two days ago. When you attempt to launch Safari or Server Admin while logged into a Network Home Directory on an Intel Mac it will bounce about 10 times, stop bouncing, and then about a minute later launch and act normal. If you quit and reopen Safari you have to wait again. Server Admin exhibits similar behavior, although the delay is longer and there are long pauses while using the program. The network home folder is on an afp share on an Intel XServe w/ 10.5.5 and 4gb of ram.
Troubleshooting steps already done:
1. Same intel mac with a local user, Safari and Server Admin launches normally.
2. Same intel mac with a portable home directory user, Safari and Server Admin launches normally.
3. Same intel mac with a different network home directory user, Safari and Server Admin have the long delay.
4. Different intel mac with a network home directory user, Safari and Server Admin have the long delay.
5. Different intel mac with a local user, Safari and Server Admin launches normally.
6. Different intel mac with a portable home directory user, Safari and Server Admin launches normally.
7. PPC mac with same network home directory user, Safari and Server Admin launches normally.
8. Checked forward and reverse DNS lookups for the home directory servers.
9. Checked entire DNS zone for forward and reverse lookups.
10. These exact same symptoms began occurring the same day at another site I manage with a separate DNS and Open Directory structure in another city.
11. All other programs appear to behave normally as far as I've been able to tell.
I have the feeling that something strange is going on with DNS and Server Admin and Safari are trying to resolve something, time out, then try to act normally. I don't know why it would just affect intel macs. In addition, there were no setting changes or DNS alterations that happened that I am aware of. These symptoms are also happening at another site that I manage with a completely separate DNS and Open Directory structure. I'm puzzled, any help would be appreciated.

Upgraded to 10.5.6 and the issue disappeared. I don't know what what wrong, but I think it was DNS related...

Cannot install Flash Builder on a network home drive

When trying to install in our corporate environment we have network home drives and the Flash Builder installer for some reason tries to create a directory here:
\\escfil02\homedir\deancj\..\Adobe Flash Builder 4
We noone here has permission to create a directory outside our home directory since it is using the .. directory. Perhaps that works fine when your home directory is local on your C: drive but it doesn't work here and I cannot really change my %HOMESHARE% environment variable (or can I?) Then I get 25 other errors but they may all be related to this first one I don't know. They are all ERROR 15078 errors
How can I get past this?
Here is the full list of errors:
Exit Code: 7
-------------------------------------- Summary --------------------------------------
- 0 fatal error(s), 25 error(s), 0 warning(s)
ERROR: 15080 Unable to create directory "\\escfil02\homedir\deancj\..\Adobe Flash Builder 4
ERROR: 15080 Command ARKCreateDirectoryCommand failed.
ERROR: 15080 Unable to delete directory "\\escfil02\homedir\deancj\..\Adobe Flash Builder 4". Error 2 The system cannot find the file specified.
ERROR: 15080 Error rolling back command ARKCreateDirectoryCommand
ERROR: 15078 Unable to delete file copy at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\configuration\config.ini" Error 3 The system cannot find the path specified.
ERROR: 15078 Error rolling back command ARKMoveFileCommand
ERROR: 15077 Unable to delete directory "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\configuration". Error 2 The system cannot find the file specified.
ERROR: 15077 Error rolling back command ARKCreateDirectoryCommand
ERROR: 15015 Unable to delete file copy at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\AMT\application.xml" Error 3 The system cannot find the path specified.
ERROR: 15015 Error rolling back command ARKMoveFileCommand
ERROR: 15014 Unable to delete file copy at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\AMT\application.sif" Error 3 The system cannot find the path specified.
ERROR: 15014 Error rolling back command ARKMoveFileCommand
ERROR: 15013 Unable to delete directory "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\AMT". Error 2 The system cannot find the file specified.
ERROR: 15013 Error rolling back command ARKCreateDirectoryCommand
ERROR: 23 Deleting Registry Key - failure. Error 5
ERROR: 4 Unable to delete file copy at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\FlashBuilder.exe" Error 3 The system cannot find the path specified.
ERROR: 4 Error rolling back command ARKMoveFileCommand
ERROR: 3 Unable to delete file copy at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\artifacts.xml" Error 3 The system cannot find the path specified.
ERROR: 3 Error rolling back command ARKMoveFileCommand
ERROR: 2 Unable to delete file copy at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4\.eclipseproduct" Error 3 The system cannot find the path specified.
ERROR: 2 Error rolling back command ARKMoveFileCommand
ERROR: 1 Unable to delete directory "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash Builder 4". Error 2 The system cannot find the file specified.
ERROR: 1 Error rolling back command ARKCreateDirectoryCommand
ERROR: The following payload errors were found during install:
ERROR: - Adobe Flash Builder: Install failed

Hi,
You're right that we're trying to create your default workspace in the folder one level up from your roaming documents folder, and that's what's causing the conflict between our installer and your roaming profile.
This is on our radar to fix for the next release, but here's a workaround you could try in the meantime. From what we've seen with roaming network profiles, our installers will have trouble mainly if your roaming documents folder has been flattened (redirected) to the root of your profile tree. If you can have your network profile reconfigured with the more conventional home folder at the top level, and the documents folder underneath it, then the relative path will be able to resolve correctly in your network tree.
There's more info here, about how to configure your roaming profile on the server to follow the conventional tree structure:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766489(WS.10).aspx
Depending on who administers your network profiles, you might need someone in IT/IS to help with this.
-Chris

More than one network home directory? (newbie question)

I have a brand new shiny XServer for a small school. They wanted their Macs managed and secured so I eagerly started moving ahead with it. Now, because of the specific file sharing requirements of the school (teachers want access to student accounts and files for homework and such) I created a standard, by-the-book Network Home folder. Then I thought about it, and I shared another directory as a Network User Home folder. And now none of my networked user accounts can log in. They all give me "can't log in, there is an error".
Is what I did possible? Allowed? Recommended? Discouraged? Can you actually define two separate Network User Home folders on the same server, and then assign different users to different home folders? My server crapped out and now I may have to wipe/reinstall the whole thing to fix it.
Does anybody have any experience with home folders like that?
Any information would be dearly appreciated,
Thanks.

Each user can have one and only one home directory, network or local. (Yes, even if you use Mobile Accounts or Portable Homes each account still has one home directory. You just have multiple copies of the user account and each copy has one home.)
You can have multiple share points that serve as home directory share points. In other words, not all of your users' homes need to be stored in the same place. By "network home directory share point," we mean a shared folder (share point) that has a corresponding dynamic automount record in the directory domain. The share point mounts at /Network/Servers/servername/path/to/sharepoint, and users defined in the directory domain can have their network homes defined there.
If you want to grant a group of teachers (let's call it teachers for simplicity) read/write access to student home directories, I'd suggest the following strategy:
1. Create two network home directory share points - one to house the students' homes and one to house the teachers' homes. For this example, let's say that the student home directory share point is located at /Volumes/Disk1/StudentHomes.
2. Create home directories for each student as you normally would.
3. Then add an ACL that allows members of the teachers group to read/write within the student home directory share point. For our example:
sudo chmod -R +ai "group:teachers allow readattr,readextattr,readsecurity,list,search,\
read,execute,writeattr,writeextattr,delete,deletechild,add_file,addsubdirectory,\
write,append,fileinherit,directoryinherit" /Volumes/Disk1/StudentHomes.
4. Now teachers simply navigate to /Network/Servers/yourservername/path.../StudentHomes/student's name and dig around to find what they want. (The teachers have read/write control of all student home directories now.)
5. When your teachers find it a little inconvenient to dig around in each student's home, suggest the following alternative: Simply create a share point to which students have read-only access and teachers can read/write. Within that share point, create "turn-in" folders for each teacher or class, and give students write-only (drop box) permission to the sub-folder. You could get more granular than this simple example where all students can turn anything into any teacher's "turn-in" folder, though.
--Gerrit

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!

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?

Network home folders

Hello All,
I need help setting up our new school, I am new to Mac, and it's quite some fun to work with. I want to create a network home folder for the students so, they can work from any of the lab computers. My fear is what happen when 50 student logon to there home directory at the same time, working on a video project, this will certainly slow down the server. My questions:
1) will Portable home directories solve my anticipated problem, if yes how do i se it up?
2) Can any one give me the best practice in setting up Mac Network for a high school?
Thanks for you help.

Portable home directories would work just fine, however each time the client syncs (usually at logon) it will take extra time to actually complete the logon. My experience is that students are VERY impatient. From time to time, you get sync conflicts as well. Students, and teachers for that matter, will get hung up on the simplest of dialogue boxes.
I suggest that you use non-portable (regular) home directories and educate the students on saving their projects to the shared folder on the local hard drive. /Users/Shared The down side to that is that the students will have to use the same computer each time they want to work with their documents.
If you're using Final Cut Express/Pro, then you can just tell the program to switch scratch disks.
If you're using iMovie, then you have to create a folder on the root level of the hard drive and allow all users read and write permission. I forget what you have to name said folder but....
Just google "iMovie 09 Network User Accounts" and you should see the problems that people are having.
I really suggest keeping the video files off of the server just for the simple fact that video takes up a BOAT LOAD of bandwidth. My guess is that the bottle neck won't actually be the server, but it'll be the switches in between if you have a bunch of people editing video simultaneously.
HTH
-Graham

Need Help setting up "Network Home Directories" or Something Similar

Alright so, I am sure the answer to my question exists but I have no idea what i am looking for as far as syntax is concerned. I have taken over as tech at a full mac School and have not touched a mac before in my life. I will try my best to give a detailed description without an entire life story.
My school has 10.4 on laptops which we run a script on to bind to a directory allowing them to access accounts created on our server. That part works fine. The problem we are having is syncing or saving any files/changes to these networked accounts. The accounts seem to have home directories created, i went through workgroup manager and set up login/out and background syncs, and nothing seems to work(Copy/save). This year it would have been nice to have the syncing feature since all student/teacher laptops would go back and forth from home and work. However next year will change a bit since we will keep all student laptops here and the teachers will still take them home. We also have desktops of course which do not move and will be accessed by the students.
I need to find a way for students to log into the server to access their account and have it automatically pop up displaying their own files/folder on any machine they access since they wont always be at the same machine. considering there will be upwards of 100 students accessing each machine, local syncing for this would not be a good idea. My best guess would be setting up network home directories so they can log into and work directly from the server and have nothing but the original OS installed on their local machine.
As far as the teachers go, Since they have one laptop the entire year and take them home the syncing method would be the best. That way they can come here, turn on their laptop, automatically sync as they log in, and save everything when they log out (or every so many minutes since some of them close it and just run home). I tried doing this with a student account but could not get it to work. My other problem with this is that the teacher laptops are 10.5 and I have no clue how to bind them to the directory since I was not the one who created the original script which is something i would like to reverse engineer to my standards since it has some nice little things in it I just wish to tweak.
A short recap of what i need:
1) Network based accounts with network home directories, nothing locally saved
2) Network Based accounts with Portable Home Directories, Syncing between local and server files
3) Bind 10.5 machines to server
4) Program to read and edit a script.
I somewhat know the terminology for PHDs and MHDs and have read a bit about those but still cannot get them to work, but I am extremely frustrated with my lack of terminology for NHDs (If that is what they would even be called) and have had a hard time finding any information on how to set them up. The only thing i found was stating that if the server goes down, so do the accounts. Which isnt a problem since we have multiple servers as well as last ditch local accounts for students to just access the computers.
As far as i know, our servers are running LDAPv3 w/ OD, maybe even not with OD, I really don't know. If anyone can give me any help with this it would be much appreciated. If you need any additional information let me know and I will try my best to get it to you. I may even be willing to wipe everything and start fresh if it is required since these havent been used much in over 2 years, only for drive mounting storage.

I received some information on another forum, however I am still stuck.
So i rebound a laptop to the server via Directory Access, created a new account using Workgroup Manager, set the Home Point in WGM for the Account to a specified folder on the server's raid and no luck.
The account authenticates with the server, but it saves everything locally and ignores the NHD. Anyone with any ideas?

Open directory, network homes and MS Word

We are running OS X & Server 10.4.8, and Word 11.2. Using network home directories, with 15users and 3 of them are portable. Running Open directory wih LDAPv3, SSL, SMB and AFP for the network homes (?).
When one of the portable users try to save his Word files he recieves the following error-message: "Word cannot save this file because it is already open elsewhere"
Google turned up the following results and suggestions from other ppl with the same problem:
#1 - Create .TemporaryItems and/or modify owner(s) on the network share.
#2 - Change the directory where files are saved via: Word > Preferences > File locaion > Document > 'Modify' (change to users 'Documents' folder.
#3 - Delete .com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist file in: User > Library > Preferences > Microsoft > (user is the name of the account having the prob)
Link to someone with the same problem(contains most of the solutions):
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-46413.html
Link to a combination of solution #1 & #2 (and a descrip of the prob):
http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=OfficeX&Number=721294& page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=31&fpart=
I have tried all of the solutions above, the first one seemed promesing but the folder already existed so i just verified that the permissions were correct and moved on. User still has the problem.
End of the last thread i posted suggests that there is no solution for this problem in Os X 10.4.2 and i read another place that it is related to Os X not closing connections to the file on the share, so it is tricked into thinking the file is open in two places when you save it the first time.
Please help!!

It was kindof a strange problem with RDC (Remote desktop connection, windows not apple).
After i installed the script RDC stopped working and i had to uninstall the script to save RDC (it`s more important then the error message in office). But uninstalling didnt work, so i did some experimenting and found out that RDC started working again if he just moved to another computer where he hadnt loaded his user while the script was running.
And even more surprislingly when he moved back to his own computer again it started working again there too. (We use network accounts)
May i ask you how you uninstalled it?

Network home best practice

We are setting up a new network of iMacs and laptops to use Network Home directories. All stations will be running 10.9 and the server will be 10.9 with Server.app 3.1. We have it currently set up, but the sync is not working. We keep having issues every 20 minutes or so and people are having issues saving permissions. We have them set up as SMB for homes. Would we do better with AFP? Any permissions that I might have wrong for the folder that the homes are being saved to?

In theory using SMB for Mavericks clients should be faster. Apple have had teething problems with SMB support in Mavericks and it is still not clear it is stable enough yet.
For laptops you would not want pure network home directories which are stored only on the server, you would want what at least used to be called portable home directories. With this the account and home directory are still stored on a server but are synced to the computer, this allows the computer to use the files even when it has no connection to the server e.g. when out of the office. When back in the office it will then sync the changes back to the server.
It used to be that you would define whether a computer was to use a pure network home directory or a portable home directory via managed preferences in Workgroup Manager. You would create a computer group to define those you wanted to have portable home directories, add the computer to the group and any user of that computer would then have their home directory synced as a portable home directory. Now with Mavericks you need to do the samething but you have to set it up via Profile Manager. You enrol the computer in to Profile Manager add it to a device group and set the device group to again sync the home directories.

Local home directories vs network home directories?

We have an existing linux server which handles web, ftp, dhcp and email for our design group. I am planning the integration of a new mac os x server to handle shared work folders, client archives, shared resources (stock images etc) with eSATA raids as a fail over back up. I have been doing a lot of reading and research, but have not arrived at a best solution for local vs network homes. Our users never connect from another mac workstation, and so utilize a number of iLife content mgmt apps. They all have large personal photo libraries, music libraries etc on their workstations. In addition, many of our projects involve working on extremely large photoshop files, video files etc. I am leaning towards leaving these users as local homes as there is concern over performance on the network. Pros? Cons? am open to any input before establishing final plans for osx server services.
Network is cat 5e ethernet with 3 gigabit switches (one on each floor of a 3 storey building with an uplink between ea floor)
more macs than I can list Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Is the local home with synchronization of
selected folders a variant of mobile home? or mobile
user? (newbie osx server admin, still digesting the
apple manuals!!
Ok what I believe your asking is can you sync your portable home directory ~/shortname to the Server /HomeDir/shortname and ignore the lets say ~/shortname/Pictures or Music Directory? Since you only want Work related files on the Server and only have to backup 1 big user directory with only work related file on the server? Well the answers is a big YES .
What is required takes a bit to setup. Heres a quick list of things to do and that need to be in place for it to all work smooth.
1. OS X Server Software with OD/LDAP setup 10.4.3 or higher!
2. All Client 10.4.3 or higher and binded to the OD/LDAP Server.
3. Setup Workgroup Admin/Preferences Management. You can set rules for a Group or individual Users. Groups being the preferred way. In here you can set the Path to the Files & Folders to ignore during the Sync. You can do lots of other MCX Managed client settings here and if your OD/bind is good it works great.
4. You'd have to move stuff around on the Local units i.e. ~/oldfiles to New ~/shortname which will be created. There a few way to do this and hold Permissions and all that just read about Mobile homes more. Think of it as a Laptop connecting for the first time to a binded OD server. Lots of folks have different ways.
My clients also work with Large files (PS, ID, ai) and a network home was a bit of a pain. To be honest it's not the large files that get you it was the BS cache files that slow it all down. There are now work arounds for the performance hit but took time for the community to figure it all out. I had them in 10.3 working on files in the /Users/Shared/ directory and moving finished work back to the server after.
10.4 has been the saviour of my sanity with mobile homes. Servers Fast Clients Fast, I have full control of clients (<--admin god complex), and all lived happily ever after... for the most part.

Local access to Network Home directories

Under Leopard, I want to allow a user to log in to the machine that hosts his network home directory, and access it locally from that machine.
User joe is set up in Open Directory to use a network home directory that is served from machine joe-ws. In other words, his Home record points to afp://;AUTH=Client%20Krb%20v2@joe-ws/Users/joe. There is also a mount record in OD that causes joe-ws:/Users to auto mount as /Network/Servers/joe-ws/Users
This is working perfectly -- Joe can log in anywhere on the network and see his files. He can also create portable home directories, sync them, and the like.
Except that he can't log in on joe-ws: if he does so, joe-ws tries to mount its own sharepoint via afp in order to find joe's home directory and that isn't a happy situation.
Is there any obvious way to do what I want?

I have found the source of my problem and resolved it -- it relates to case-sensitivity of host names.
What is supposed to happen is that automount and autofs are smart enough not to try to mount shares that are hosted locally. If, for example, if there is mount record in the directory asking for afp://joe-ws/Users to be mounted in /Network/Servers/joe-ws/Users, then on every machine but joe-ws, it'll happen. On joe-ws, on the other hand, automount just creates /Network/Servers/joe-ws as a link to /
In my case, there was a typo in the local DNS zone records, causing joe-ws to think it's name was joe-ws.DOMAIN.com, whereas the mount records referred to joe-ws.domain.com (difference being case).
Therefore, automount, running on joe-ws.DOMAIN.com tried to mount a sharepoint hosted on joe-ws.domain.com. DNS sees these as the same host; automount doesn't, so fails to apply the special magic that normally applies when you ask it to mount a sharepoint that is hosted locally.

Newbee question on network home folders

I have 3 or 4 networked Macs in my home and I want everyone to have access to their own home folder from any Mac. Therefore the necessity for networked home folders. But I know nothing about how to set them up or even if it is possible in this situation. I have a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 server but have not set it up yet. Some Macs are a mix of 10.4 and 10.5.
How do I go about learning how to set this up? What are PHD (portable home directories)? How does mail work in a network home directory environment? All family members are on .mac mail.
Thank you for your help in getting this set up in my home.

A Network Home folder is simply where your Home Directory is stored on the Server rather than locally on you Mac.
The experience of using the Mac does not change so Mail and all other applications behave as they do with a normal local home. As you say this allows you to log in from any Mac. but before you set this up it is advisable to make all of your Macs identical, e.g make sure they all have the same Application, fonts, plugins etc because it is only the files that are normally in HD > Users > yourhomefolder
that are stored on the server, everything else stays local.
As for setting it up http://www.afp548.com/ has some good guides for Tiger server that can be adapted for Leopard
Portable home directories are similar in that the Home Directory is stored on the server, but a PHD syncs the directory to your local mac as well, so in theory this is the best of both worlds in that you work on a local home folder and everytime you log in and out your changes are sync'd back to the server.
This still allows you to log in from another Mac, and also means you can work on a laptop away from your network.
But like I said "in Theory" this is best of both worlds, and for the majority of the time it works well, but you can run into complications, such as errors syncing and the potential to loose work if you log into the account on two macs at the same time.

Time Machine for clients + Network Home folders?

I currently use Retrospect to back up my client machines, but frankly I don't like it that much. I'd really like to have Time Machine working for all of the client machines so that the users can easily grab copies of their own backups, rather than having to request them from me. I plan to continue to use Retrospect to back up the data on the server and to back up non-Leopard and non-OS X clients.
However, I'm also hoping to move some or all of my OS X clients to network home directories. I saw some mention in a forum that Time Machine doesn't work with network home directories, but I can't find anything about this in the server documentation. Is this true? Can't I have my network home directory clients back up their home directories to another share point using Time Machine?
Thanks in advance for any information on this or alternative ideas.
Greg

found the answer ;-)
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3247301

Step-by-step instructions for NetBoot & Network Home folders?

I've only done this once and that was about three years ago and I was operating mostly on trial and error, so I need some help.
Let's say I have twenty Power Mac G5s on a network, each with a legal OS X license (of course). I have an Xserve G5 running 10.4 Server and a couple hundred gigabytes of free space. I also have a bootable FireWire hard drive that contains a complete system build (including the OS and applications) that will run on any of those G5s. The build is set up with a single "Administrator" user account.
Normally when I do machine deployment I would use a tool like SuperDuper to image the FireWire drive onto the hard drives of the G5s, then set up a user account for that user on that computer. But what I REALLY want to do is turn my FireWire drive into a disk image that I can host on my Xserve and have all those computers booting from it. Additionally, I want to set up a network home folder system so that a user can, if he/she wishes, use a different computer on the network but still retain all of his/her 'local' files and preferences and settings.
I've Googled quite a bit and came up with a number of pages that presume to explain how this is done but 100% of them are geared towards people who are already super-savvy with things like Unix command lines and such. I am not. Therefore, I need a very specific, very detailed set of walk-through instructions that spells out exactly how to do this. Does such a document exist anywhere? HELP!

For starters, all the info you need is contained within the OS X Server PDF manuals, which should have came with your Xserve. You can download them all here: http://www.apple.com/support/manuals/macosxserver/
Second, you should really post your questions in the OS X Server discussions, as they're obviously more geared toward the tasks you wish to accomplish:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=96

Folder Redirection not working on SMB Network Home Directories

I've setup network home directories on a 10.7.3 server. NHDs are available via SMB currently. I'm trying to setup folder redirection via MCXRedirector for both the ~/Library/Cache folder and ~/Downloads and redirect them to the local client. Client is 10.7.3 joined to OD. I'm using Login Redirection and the option to delete the existing folder and create a symlink. I used these instructions to create the redirectors: http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=MCXRedirector
When NHDs are available via SMB, the folders are created on the local client, but the symlinks aren't created in the NHD. I can switch the NHDs to be available via AFP, and then it works fine. I can switch back to SMB and the symlink stays in place and appears to work with no issue.
Am I missing something here? I can't find any documentation that says I can't use MCXRedirector with SMB shares, and I see a number of posts where it appears that people are using it successfully... so I'm not sure what is wrong? Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

Hi James,
For folder redirection issues, we can go to Windows Logs\Application in Event Viewer to check if some related error events were logged. Besides, we can also run cmd command
gpresult/v or gpresult/z to collect group policy result to check if something goes wrong.
Regarding how to configure folder redirection, in my opinion, the following article provides a good guide.
Configuring Folder Redirection
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/cc786749.aspx
Best regards,
Frank Shen

Network home structure vs portable home structure

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