NFS for portable home directories not working

I just recently tried to move our PHD's over to NFS instead of AFP to allow for fast user switching and some other reasons.
However it doesn't work at all... The automount seems to work fine, as I can browse to /Network/Servers/servername/Users/ fine, but when the user tries to sync, a dialog pops up:
The sync could not complete because your network home at "nfs://servername/Users" is currently unavailable.
Try again later when it is available.
and then in the console it shows:
com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent[14236] mount_nfs: /Volumes/Users: Operation not permitted
HomeSync[14369] HomeSync.syncNow: Unable to mount server URL at 'nfs://servername/Users', status = 65.
com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent[14236] HomeSync[14369:903] HomeSync.syncNow: Unable to mount server URL at 'nfs://servername/Users', status = 65.
It seems like its trying to mount it at /Volumes/Users, but it can't (because a normal user can't mount nfs volumes?(..as far as i know))...and furthermore I don't know why it needs to mount it at /Volumes/Users when it's already automounted at /Network/Servers/servername/Users

I just managed to get my first sync to work.
My server exports /opt/home/<user> but not /opt/home since each user has a separate lvm volume. What worked was the following:
dscl . -delete /Users/<user> dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory
dscl . -append /Users/<user> dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory "<homedir><url>nfs://find/opt/home/<user></url><path></path></homedir>"
This is similar to what I saw on http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/leopard-mobileaccounts-and-nfs-homes / except putting the users name (in place of <user> as part of the url instead of part of the path.
The value for dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory was formerly /Network/Servers/<server>/opt/home/<user> which is a perfectly good directory, but not a url. I don't know why it wouldn't use the directory and manufactured a url instead.
By changing the value back to default and making my server export /opt/home, I'm still able to sync. Naturally I like this solution much better.
Doesn't seem like this solution will help you much if a given user can sync on some machines and not others, unless maybe you have different export rules to different machines in your network.

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Setting Custom location for Portable Home Directories

I'm using the Portable Home Directories to create a separate home on certain desktop machines for users to use on that machine only. These are not synced either way to the server.
Problem is I want it to create the homes on a different internal hard disk. Rather than in the users folder on the boot drive.
Is this possible, and if so how?
Cheers,
Mark

I've found this page which seems to do exactly what I want. Though I don't understand what a loginhook is and where I would put this text.
The site is http://blogs.cofa.unsw.edu.au/blog/nigelkersten/osxserver/2006/02/09/
Cheers

Best Practice for Portable Home Directories

What are the 'best practice' directories to sync for Portable Homes - at login and in the background. I want to make my user experience a little better than it is now.
Login and logout take about 2 minutes - even over ethernet 100Mb, and longer using Airport, and 'background' home directory syncing seems to always suck all of my network bandwidth - making apps like Safari unusable - even though I have barely changed anything in the folders I am syncing.
My personal home directory is 1.5Gb, and I keep my Music, Pictures and Movies on the network - as Apple suggest.

I generally recommend the following for the least impact on user experience:
1. Put your server and clients that will use mobile accounts and portable homes on a Gigabit Ethernet switch. It's a small price to pay for much more customer satisfaction.
2. Put more RAM in the server, especially if you're dealing with a few users with large homes or several users with moderately-sized (less than 1.0GB) ones. This will also let you employ server-side tracking (for 10.5 server).
3. Only sync and login/logout. Use Workgroup Manager to define all portable preferences. Choose to manage login/logout sync, and specify the items to sync; for the whole home, use "~". Omit things like ~/.Trash. Choose to manage the background sync, but remove all items from the "sync these items" list. Choose to manage the background sync interval by setting it to manual. This way, the user doesn't accidentally configure a background sync: we've told it to sync nothing only we say it can.
--Gerrit

Tip - Hidden Keys for Portable Home Directories

FYI, the following info was posted by John de Troye on the Client Management mailing list.
hth,
b.
Buried inside the managed client properties are a set of keys that allow more overt control of the portable home directory (PHD) behavior. Many people have asked for a procedure to block the error message that pops up when users change computers (the "Your network home has changed..." dialog). Others have asked about being able to force a dominant direction for syncing the portable/local home and the network home directories. The keys noted below can be applied inside the Preference Editor in Workgroup manager for a set of computers, groups, or users using the Mobility settings. They can also be applied using the 'defaults' command directly at a standalone client.
In WGM, in the account (computer/group/user) that you are establishing mobility for, select the Details tab in the Preferences settings. Locate the "com.apple.homeSync" domain. It should contain various settings, such as "excludedItems-raw" and "syncPeriodSeconds". You can click on the 'Always' or 'Once' setting (your choice) and then on the 'New Key' button. You will then add the new keys as needed.
domain: com.apple.homeSync
key: "loginConflictResolution"
description: who wins login/logout conflicts
values (number):
1 = local home wins
2 = network home wins
comment: DANGER: this may also affect the first time sync;
key: "periodicConflictResolution"
description: who wins background/Sync Now conflicts
values (number):
0 = show conflict dialog
1 = local home wins
2 = network home wins
key: "periodicSuppressErrors" = suppress background sync error messages
values (boolean):
true = suppress error dialogs
false = show error dialogs
A key (no pun intended) point to be aware of is that you should rigorously test this out with some test accounts first. Finding out that your users lose all of their files because you decided to force the sync in one direction is not a good way to establish user vs support relations.
This material, with pictures, will be in the next Tips and Tricks doc.

I've found this page which seems to do exactly what I want. Though I don't understand what a loginhook is and where I would put this text.
The site is http://blogs.cofa.unsw.edu.au/blog/nigelkersten/osxserver/2006/02/09/
Cheers

Why does the security code for my home network not work with my hp6500?

I have a HPOfficejet 6500A Plus and am running windows 7 on a Dell desktop. I've tried to get my printer to connect to a home network and every time I type in the password it won't connect...it fails the security. I've always used the direct printer cable to connect one of my desktops to the computer and am trying to get the wireless featur to work...it won't.

Hi,
Please refer the link below and download HP Print and Scan Dr utility which will be able to help in installing printer and checking for correct security key.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c02271484&tmp_task=useCategory&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=e...
Although I am an HP employee, I am speaking for myself and not for HP.
--Say "Thanks" by clicking the Kudos Star in the post that helped you.
--Please mark the post that solves your problem as "Accepted Solution"

Very slow login/logout with Portable Home Directories

I've set up Portable Home Directories for our department so that people can work from different computers if need be (also, I think our network is too slow to use network home directories). However, the login times are excruciating - some users report average 45 minute login times. None of these users are moving huge files or anything, and even if I just log someone out (completing the sync) and then log back in, the login will be very slow.
If I disconnect the computers from the network, obviously it logs in quickly because it can't connect to the server, but I don't want to do that (or disable login/logout sync altogether). I tried removing things from the login/logout sync rules, but often the sync takes time just on 'Finishing' or 'Stopping', so I don't think that it's any particular files that take a lot of time.
On a possibly related note, for some reason our computers all take perhaps 30 seconds to get an IP address when starting up, waking up from sleep, etc. Is there any reason why the computer would need to be doing this repeatedly? Especially on logout, this wouldn't seem relevant, but I've seen that mentioned in other threads.
Thanks in advance for any advice,
Greg

Apple Discussions has a special forum just for Portable Home Directories, you might want to search and/or post your question there:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1249

Does a 10.7 client work with a 10.6.8 server with portable home directories??

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It seems to work. Slow and I have seen it hang at logout once (had to force shutdown the machine), maybe because I had two clients open at the same time.

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Portable Home Directories on ReadyNAS

I have a MacMini runing OS X 10.6 in an environment with about 15 users. Portable Home Directories are currently setup and working on the server. The server is almost out of space and I would like to move these PHD's to a ReadyNAS and have them sync properly.
I am having a tough time figuring this out. I have created shares on the ReadyNAS and can access the shares without a problem.
Through Server Admin I have tried both AFP and NFS shares. I can successfully create a user's home drive on either type of share.
When I share by NFS I can log in as a user and it tries to begin syncing. It gets stuck on connecting to network drive and then gives me an error that the NFS share is not available.
If I share via AFP I get a message that says the user cannot login due to an error.
I have searched quite a bit and have found that PHD's are not documented very well. Does anyone have experience with PHD's and a ReadyNAS? If so I would appreciate any help.

Hi Guys, So far I have found what seems to be a fix for this issue. I was also having the issue happen to me around some iphoto file but that seems to be coincidental. I will detail what I did below but please first backup the mobile account on the local machine as you will need to recreate it.
Backup the local mobile home folder
Log into a admin account and delete the mobile account under the Accounts Pane in System Prefs
Log into the users Network account on the notebook
Delete all the following items
~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices
~/Library/Mirrors
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.syncservices.*
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.filesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.homesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.syndication.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Syndication
Logout of the Network account and then back in
Recreate the Mobile Account
From this point on I have not seen any issues with the FileSyncAgent crashing. Omit any of the files listed above that do not exist. I generally have the notebooks sync on login and logout and I forced a sync while logged in to make sure everything was okay and so far so good. Hope this helps.

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?

Gerben Wierda wrote:
Or: you create the users anew in the network directory, you replace their home directories with the content of what is on the MacBook (TDM is your friend) and do the chmod. Easier still.
That way, I suggest the migration in that way; because, you can test everything out before the data gets moved over. There's nothing like something going wrong in the setup/migration, and you have to do it all over again.
Kirk, you can always put the Home directories/folder on an external. But if you do, you'll probably want to run this command in Terminal:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool YES
That sets the system-wide setting to mount external HDs on startup. The default behavior in OS X, probably around 10.3 onward (but Apple may have flip-flopped on this), is to mount externals on user GUI-login, not on startup like internal HDs. The default behavior is a huge problem with network users, whose home directories reside on the external, since the external on GUI login often mounts "too late" and new "phantom" home directories are created (along with warning messages that the home directory can't be found) and you sometimes get duplicate mount points. In short, the default behavior creates a bit of mess. To spare you some frustration, run that command, which will mount the externals on startup, so the home folders are always available.
It's also handy if you plan on creating other shares on the external; it prevents some flaky behavior.
Gerben's "general description" can be applied to Lion and Mountain Lion, although with Mountain Lion you have fewer tools, and you'll often be working in Server.app rather than some of the older tools like Server Admin.
Again, basically you need to:
(1) Setup file sharing, where you designate a directory/folder as a share to hold the network home directories. On the default install, Apple makes /Users a share, and you could (similar to what Gerben did) use that to hold not only local accounts' but also the network accounts' home directories. In that setup all users' home directories reside in the same place. All you have to do then is check the box "Make available for home directories over" and leave "AFP". See below; note the very last checkbox; that needs to be checked:
I preferred to keep the local and network users separate, so I actually use a different share for the network users, and not /Users. If you go that route, pay attention to the permissions, it's somewhat easy to get them wrong. I think I cheated and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the /Users directory to another HD, then just renamed the directory. FYI you're actually not seeing this in these screen shots, since I'm using a "fresh install" virtual machine to make the screen shots.
Also if you don't need it, I'd probably uncheck "Share with Windows clients (SMB).
2. You need to setup Open Directory, so you can manage Network Users. Since you want portable home directories, then you might consider using Profile Manager (introduced in Lion Server), which is Apple's latest tool for that. You can also download separate Workgroup Manager as well. Not sure which is better, or exactly why there are both. I think the documention indicated for older pre-Lion OSes, Workgroup Manager is still around.
2a - If you go straight to Profile Manager, and set it up, it will first make you setup Open Directory, then the rest of the setup for Profile Manager itself.
2b - Or you can always "two-step", first setup Open Directory, then later if you want "Profile Manager".
3. Once you have OD (step 2), and the share setup for network home directories (step), you use Server.app to create the network users, and assign their home directory to the share not local. Note the entry "Home Folder"; use the pull-down menu to select your share. See below.
If you forget to set the Home Folder, you can always "edit" the user and change the Home Folder to the share, and not Local Only.
4. To get portable Home directories, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to setup and activate Profile Manager or use Workgroup Manager. Sorry not much details I can provide there, I've only played with it a bit, and was planning on upgrading my MacBook Pro to Mountain Lion before giving it a go again.

Home Sharing, Network accounts with Portable Home Directories, iTunes 10

I am using OS X Server an on that server is my account. I am also using a MBA with that same account using portable home directories (PHD). The MBA home directory does not contain my iTunes music, that is somewhere in /Users/Shared, because I do not want the added burden of encryption (the home dir is FileVault protected on the MBA, but not on the server)
Thusfar, I worked on the MBA with iTunes and used rsync to sync with the server. There are reasons I want to stop that route (which are not important for the question)
I have just upgraded to iTunes 10 before trying the following:
1. Enable home sharing on the server
2. Look for shared libraries on the MBA
And found out that my account on the server needs to be logged in permanently and iTunes running to use Home Sharing that way. That stops the ordinary syncing of PHD so that is not a solution. Besides, I do not want to have an account logged in all the time.
So, given the scenario that I want full two-way syncing of my iTunes library between my computers and that I prefer not to have an account logged in on the server, is there a solution?

I ended up creating a dedicated local account for iTunes serving on my mini server.

Home Sync Not Working! Please Help!

Hi Everyone,
So I have a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard Server and two clients three clients all running Lion. Everyone has Portable Home Directories with File Syncing which syncs up documents and the desktop folder This seems to be working fine except I am running into one problem. I have a iMac and a Macbook Pro and i often will do work on my laptop and then want to swtich to my iMac and pickup where I left off with my work. I have used file sync and portable home directories to keep my iMac and MacBook Pro in sync and this seemed to be working fine up until a few days ago. For some reason, If I make a change on my Macbook pro like say I add a folder and have it sync, it will often times not sync that file and rarely it will, however if I were to drop a file onto the network volume, it would appear on my MacBook Pro right away. My iMac seems to be working fine however. If I create a file, it will show up on the server, and vise versa so I am wondering if there is a way to reset home sync or what I could to make it work correctly. I have tried going into workgrop manager and telling it to never sync and then reenableing the sync but this didn't work and I have also tried deleteing all the files and then bringing them all back and again the same probelms happen. Also repaired permissions on all machines. Any suggetions on how I could fix this?
Thanks,
-Mike

Tried reinstalling windows 7 and iTunes on a brand new SSD disk. Also updated iPhone iOS to 6.1
I am getting desperate.

Portable Home Directories, FileSyncAgent, and Case-sensitive drives

I have a 10.5.3 Server machine that is serving (via NFS) home directories to a mixed group of Leopard (10.5.3) and Linux clients. The drive containing user home directories is formatted to be case-sensitive. I also use Portable Home Directories and mobile accounts on all the Leopard clients. Many of the client machines have case-insensitive drives.
FileSyncAgent is dying on the client machines with a lot of "Reverification failed" messasges in ~/Library/Logs/FileSyncAgent.log. The files being verified often have mixed case file names, while the error messages show lower case file names.
Anyone else seeing FileSyncAgent dying on every home sync?

Hi Guys, So far I have found what seems to be a fix for this issue. I was also having the issue happen to me around some iphoto file but that seems to be coincidental. I will detail what I did below but please first backup the mobile account on the local machine as you will need to recreate it.
Backup the local mobile home folder
Log into a admin account and delete the mobile account under the Accounts Pane in System Prefs
Log into the users Network account on the notebook
Delete all the following items
~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices
~/Library/Mirrors
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.syncservices.*
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.filesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.homesync.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.syndication.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Syndication
Logout of the Network account and then back in
Recreate the Mobile Account
From this point on I have not seen any issues with the FileSyncAgent crashing. Omit any of the files listed above that do not exist. I generally have the notebooks sync on login and logout and I forced a sync while logged in to make sure everything was okay and so far so good. Hope this helps.

Portable Home Directories and iphoto - problems

Hi
We have recently set up the 'mobility' funtion for our staff via our 10.4 server - thuse creating Portable Home Directories. This all seems to be working fine and documents sync perfectly. What is not behaving is iphoto - we keep getting synchronization conflicts based around iphoto files - not the images themselves but files such as:
Library6.iphoto
iphoto.ipspot
Dir.data
Albumdata.xml
.lpoptions (not sure if this one relates to iphoto but is recurring on numerous acccounts)
Anyone have any clues on this. Iphoto does not seem to be syncing the images at all........and I can't resolve the conflict.
Chris

iPhoto works fine with my users so I can't offer much assistance there, but .lpoptions is where the default printer is stored, and that's typically not something you'd want to synchronize. I personally exclude it.

Portable Home Directories and Entourage

I going to be implementing Portable Home Directories into our office, but I am trying to figure out what I want to be syncing.
The office uses Entourage and having 60+ users. From what I can if I exclude the microsoft user data folder I don't get the account to show up in Entourage when I switch to another computer.
I really don't want to be syncing Microsoft User Data folder for each user onto the server. Considering we have a mail cap of 2gig some users are larger due to historical reasons and rank. We also use public folders heavily and some public folders can be about 10gig.
So my question is, is there away to get around this. Can I get the account information to sync for Entourage, but not the email. I see how it works with apple mail were it syncs the mail folder, but excludes the folders that contain the email.
I have a feeling the answer to my question no, but just checking if any one else has found a work around.

Since Entourage is a DB it would sync the whole 2GB or 10GB every time. This is why Apple pushes there product as thy use a flat file system where only the files that changed would be sync'd. Entourage is a db and since there is no program out there that can open the db up and just sync or backup what has changed you will sync the whole profile /db.

NFS for portable home directories not working

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