PHD Synchronization

Question

Greetings Everyone,
I have a couple of users that are logging in to an Open Directory environment. Their user accounts have been configured to synchronize their home directories with the server.
Some of them are having issues where they're being prompted with a message telling them that the location of their home directories has been changed when they log on. They're asked whether or not they want to use the local copy or the server's copy. The other problem is that the synchronization process doesn't exclude directories that are indicated as needing to be excluded at the server level.
I've seen these posts before in the forum and I've noticed that people recommend deleting files.
Which files should be deleted/renamed and where should they be deleted/renamed from (server or client)? Also, is there any technical documentation about how the synchronization process works such as what files it uses to determine what should be synchronized, etc?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Thanks for posting a reply, it reminded me that I wanted to post the solution that I found from reading the manuals (imagine that!), talking to Apple Support and troubleshooting on my own.
I have seen your posts, pedz. They were helpful to a degree.
Here goes the excerpt of the entry I posted on our internal blog:
While you can configure PHD synchronization at the group, user and computer level, there is an order of precedence at which those different items are replied. User settings override group settings which overrides computer settings. For example, if group settings were set to include the Music folder, but user settings were set to exclude it, it wouldn’t be synchronized.
Here are the oddities that I discovered.
1. Ensure that there are no conflicting rules set at different levels as described above. I removed the group synchronization settings that <old company> had set up along with the user settings. We only have customized mobility settings for users and that is all that we currently need. Although it is better to set this at the group level, it will be sufficient for the time being.
2. When setting an exclusion, it must be done from a remote machine with the Workgroup Manager installed. Instead of manually typing the path, you need to click the ellipsis button and select the folder to exclude for the user that you are locally logged in as (it doesn’t matter that you are setting this for a different user). This has something to do with the way that OS X reads the paths and I’m not completely sure that I understand it, but there is a very small paragraph in the User Administration manual that covers it.
3. Merge with user settings should be unchecked so that the server-level settings override the settings of the user. This was probably one of the most confusing check boxes to figure out, but once done, it ensures that the user has zero control over what synchronizes. This must be done for both Login and Logout synchronization and Background synchronization.
If you want to force the machine to pull the rules down from the server again, you must log in as the local administrator and rename the /Library/Mirrors folder and logout again. Apparently there is a brief delay between the setting of rules and their actual enforcement. Renaming this folder seems to force the machine to download the settings. Also, you should go into NetInfo and delete the ‘mcx_cache’ entry under ‘config’ as well as you should delete ‘mcx_cache’ from the center column (if it exists there).