Portable Home Directories usage

Hi, I think I see where portable home directory is good for laptop users that might be away from server at times. Would one sugget this for a remote home user that has an iMac who wants to connect to their server, hve it secure (VPN?), have access files on the server from home, yet be able to run the home iMac as a stand alone, not-connected to the server at all times. There's a high speed cable connection at each end. Thanks - Lewis

I came across this information a while back. Not exactly what you are looking for but contains good information on how you might achieve what you want to do. WARNING: this is not for the faint of heart. It take deep technical knowledge of the inner workings of OS X and LDAP.
http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2006/03/15/portable-home-directories-without-op en-directory/

Similar Messages

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.

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.

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

Subject says it all. I need to move to 10.7 on the clients because I need XCode. But 10.7 Server seems dumbed-down, brittle and bug-ridden, so I'd rather stay at 10.6.8 server for the time being. I know already from some off site users of my server that mail works fine between 10.7 clients and 10.6.8 server. But what about mobile accounts and portable home directories? That is a very important feature for me.

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.

Moving Portable Home Directories from one server to another

I am in the process of migrating users from an older xserve running 10.3 with open directory to a new xserve running 10.5. So far, everything is looking good with the migration, the only major issue I'm running into in my testing is with Portable Home Directories. Presently, the portable home directory on the computer still points to the old server for existing user accounts after they are moved to the new open directory server. On the 10.3 server, the home directories are all mounted under /Volumes/Home, where on Leopard it appears it wants to create the shares under /Volumes/ServerName/Folder. Granted, at present the original server's Home Folders are on a fiber attached raid and in testing I don't have this available. Any suggestions on a way to test easily without moving the raid? Also, is there an easy way to do a mass change on user machines where if I move my raid over to the new server, I can make sure that users data is being backed up to the proper location?
Sorry for the lengthy post, just trying to make sure I'm covering all my bases, heh.

Antonio, thanks for the response. I do have one more question regarding this. On the client side, the mirrors.plist file references the old server FQDN and share name. Because this will be being moved over to the new server, is there an easy method to update the clients mirror plist without breaking the PHD mirror? My big concern here is that either the users will not be able to synchronize phd's or we will have to re-establish all the phd's from the client machines to the server. My thought here is simply using a cname to direct any traffic still trying to hit the old server name to the new server name.

Portable Home Directories Pretty Much Unusable

Running OSX Server 10.6.2 and a dozen or so client macs with either 10.5 or 10.6 on them, we are having huge problems with portable home directories.
Firstly, after a while after initial install I did change certain sync settings in the workgroup manager - namely omitting library folders from the sync, and changing sync frequency from every 2 hours and on startup over to only on startup and shutdown, but none of these settings are ever honoured by the client machines - they keep syncing every 2 hours and just on startup as per the previous settings, and still sync the library folders. Tried deleting the managed preferences folder on client machines, or wiping home directories on the server and recreating - all without success.
Secondly, the sync at startup takes forever (gradually seems to be getting worse and worse) and now hangs for about ten minutes at the end of sync just stating 'finishing'. This is getting to be a real impact on our workflow. Even if users cancel the sync it happens.
Getting seriously annoyed with this software now. Would be nice if Apple actually fixed bugs in their server software - PHD has always been terrible IMHO.

yeah i can only agree to that. wasted dozens of hours settings up a 10.5.8 server with some leo-clients...been testing things for a couple of months and just don't trust it anymore...too much buggy and illogical behaviour and totally insufficient documentation... i rather use rsync to copy client data onto a bkup fileserver.

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.

Portable Home Directories

I have a Tiger Server that hosts portable home directories for my Leopard Clients.
I cannot get a portable home directory to sync with my Snow Leopard client.
Is this possible?

I have a snow leopard server. My < 10.6 clients can still mount their remote home directories using smb, but my snow leopard clients cannot. Has anyone shed any light on this issue?
my client log says:
Nov 13 09:43:40 bach07 authorizationhost[165]: cifs home directory mount failed in creating directory path: status = Authentication error
Nov 13 09:44:41 bach07 edu.mit.Kerberos.CCacheServer[178]: launchctl start error: No such process
My server log says:
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/oplock.c:init_oplocks(863)
init_oplocks: initializing messages.
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/process.c:process_smb(1077)
Transaction 0 of length 51
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/process.c:switch_message(927)
switch message SMBnegprot (pid 2508) conn 0x0
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/secctx.c:set_secctx(278)
setting sec ctx (0, 0) - secctx_stackndx = 0
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/negprot.c:reply_negprot(526)
Requested protocol [NT LM 0.12]
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/negprot.c:reply_nt1(385)
using SPNEGO
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/negprot.c:reply_negprot(627)
Selected protocol NT LM 0.12
[2009/11/13 09:44:47, 3] /SourceCache/samba/samba-235/samba/source/smbd/process.c:timeout_processing(133 7)
timeout_processing: End of file from client (client has disconnected).

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

Using Portable Home Directories with more than one client

Hi, I've got a general question about Portable Home Directories (PHD) that I'm hoping someone with more experience can help me with. I've only ever tied used PHDs to tie a Network Home to a single laptop in the past. But now I'd like to sync the home directories of a user that uses both an iMac (in the office) and a MacBook Air (on the road).
Any caveats to watch out for if we do this?
What if the user is logged into both machines at the same time?
What if the home directory on the iMac is larger than the entire SSD on the MacBook?
Appreciate any advice before heading down this path…

well... my english is not so good but i will try to explain it to you...
iTunes have a funcion that put the music in the iPod automaticaly and it will put the music of THAT computer in your iPod.
so when you conect your iPod go to options and select put the music manually or something like that (i have it in spanish XD)
or go to the "help" in iTunes > "help iTunes" then... charge iPod > charge iPod manually
this is dificult to explain in english im from argentina XD i hope you understand me XD

Disabling portable home directories? (network wide)

We're fed up with portable home directories and the constant sync errors they throw up.
Can I just turn off PHD to make it function as it did before?
How best to go about this?

If you just want to up and shut down the entire portable home directory, and some of your users use it and some don't, the best way would be to select all the users in the directory at the same time and go to the preferences area. Hit the Mobile button, and turn off everything that has to do with portable home directories.
I have a bunch of users that also find they get sync errors.
95 times out of 100 the problems are solveable if the user just reads the sync problem.
With a friendly attitude, point out that they just have to read the error. Perhaps explain what it means... If you do this once, your users will usually figure it out the next time it happens.
Also, remember that sync errors don't have to solved right away. You can fix it later.
HTH
-Graham

Mail breaks with Portable Home directories

Anyone using portable home directories in Lion yet?
Just set up a test account on a Lion Server/Lion Client. Syncing seems to be working fine but everytime I switch computers, Mail freaks out and returns:
"Your mail index has been damaged. To repair it, quit Mail" After 'reloading' my mailboxes, it works fine...until I switch computers again. Mail is standard IMAP to a gmail account.
Anybody else seeing this?

Solved this one on my own. It seems that Apple has neglected to update the Portable Home Directories syncing exclusion rules for the locations of the new Mail files, they still show the old Snow Leopard Locations.
In Worgroup Manager in mobility settings for the clients, under "Preference Sync" change the two Mail related items in the "Skip items..." section to the following:
Partial Path: ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/AvailableFeeds
Partial Path: ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index
(note the change from Full Path to Partial Path)
It really would be good if Apple did a little more QA before releasing their products.

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

Portable Home Directories usage

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