Sym linked home folders with portable home directories

Hi
I have a Mac Pro with an SSD boot disk and an internal RAID0 for data. For obvious reasons I want to use the RAID for the majority of users' files and leave the SSD as an OS and application disk.
I've experimented with moving the entire set of home directories off onto the RAID, but this (bizarrly) seems to cause problems with VPN connecticity for remote users. I've now I followed Matt Gemmel's excellent guide here:
http://mattgemmell.com/2011/06/21/using-os-x-with-an-ssd-plus-hdd-setup/
This worked very well for local users and felt faster than the previous method, probably due to ~/Library remaining on the SSD.
However, when I came to implement PHDs via the mobility option in Workgroup Manager, I found that instead of syncing the sym link targets, client machines only sync the sym links themselves, which is entirely useless.
Does anyone know of a fix/workaround so that mobile home sync will find the sym link targets correctly?
Thanks
Ben

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

Similar Messages

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.

Help with Portable Home Directories and AD

Is it possible to implement "Portable Home Directories" without an Open Directory server, using just binding to an Active Directory Domain. (no "Golden Triangle")?
We are just starting to integrate Macs into our company (finally!) and I'm looking for the best way to allow Macbook Pro users to have their files sync'ed with their NW home folder and still available locally when they are offline.
I'm able to bind to AD successfully but can't find any documentation on how to make the sync happen.
Thanks

If you are putting Macs in a LARGE business environment then bookmark the site www.MacWindows.com. They do nothing then connect lone macs into Windows Domains. Pay attention to the links on side panel of the slash page to get to the section you want to read the reader reports.

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.

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.

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

WGM creates new home folders with _unknown user/group, SA can't change it

A little background:
In our school we've got an xserve (about 1.5 yrs old), that was having issues last year. (the OD database pretty much ate itself). in august we did a clean install of 10.5, and updated to 10.5.3 (after suffering through the AFP/OD issues in 10.5.2). Because of the corrupt database from the last server, and the fact that a large number of our accounts have migrated through 4-5 iterations of servers from 9.2 on through 10.4.11, we created all new clean accounts by hand in WGM and moved the user files to the new home folders, changed user and permissions with SA to the new accounts and propogated that info to all the files for each home folder. everything has been going fine since then.
until this week.
the issue was discovered when we tried to create a new staff account (we created several accounts last week with no issue). in WGM everything looked fine. it created the account, assigned it to the proper group, and sucessfully created a home folder. the problem however was when we went into SA to change the permissions. we don't need everybody seeing everyone else's files, so we change the default group and everyone permissions to something more appropriate (don't even get me started on that gripe). When you navigate to the new home folder you just created in WGM, it shows the owner as _unknown (read/write) and group _unknown (read only... I think), Everyone (read only). Server Admin refuses to change the user or group. doesn't matter whether you use the 'show users/group' dialog and drag the account, or whether you edit it manually and insert the short name or UID. when you hit save, it stubbornly reverts back to unknown/unknown for user and group. we've tried creating accounts with different templates, no template, different account names and UID's, all with the same result.
The odd part is that nothing in the OS has changed since we first set it up and created all the users. nothing installed, nothing updated...
We've stayed at 10.5.3 due to the disaster in one of the updates (10.5.5 I think) that many of our other local districts had with network accounts not being able to see their own library folders due to permission issues, as well as the AFP causing 100% CPU use bug reported with 10.5.5
A second, probably related issue is that when browsing home folders in Server Admin filesharing, any files our network users create seem to end up assignedunknown/unknown for user and group (as far back as October it seems). After searching around the net most of the day I came across a lot of info about the _unknown user issues for folks upgrading from 10.4, but these are all newly created 10.5 network users (not local) logging in and working in home folders on the server. The original owners can read/write/delete these files as normal.
Any help would be most appreciated.

ok... I find we were shot in the foot by one of our own.
The quick answer: DO A GET INFO ON THE VOLUME WITH THE SHAREPOINTS! if the 'ignore permissions on this volume' box is checked... UNCHECK IT!
Explaination: not sure how the ignore permissions box got checked, but I don't think it was done directly by human hands. we use Carbon Copy Cloner Ver. 3.something (not sure which at this point) to back up both our data (daily) and server (weekly) drives to remote storage. by striking coincidence, things started saving with _unknown user and group about the same time as crash reporter shows that CCC hosed itself. My guess is that CCC temporarily ignores permissions (as shown in the status when you do a clone) and then resets them to their original state. when it crashed, it looks like they were still set to ignore, so it happily set it back to that state every time it ran after that. not sure why the account creation issue suddenly turned up after so long... In any event, it turns out that if you have sharepoints on a server volume, AND you set the OS to ignore permissions on that volume, BAD things happen (I'm not sure it should even be an option on a shared volume, but that's for the engineering folks to figure out.) .... specifically, the symptoms above. if you login as root (yeah, I know that's something you should never do) and uncheck the ignore permissions box on the volume, then log into WGM, as root (yeah, yeah, I know... even worse) and set ALL of the Directory Administrator accounts to 'do not administer this server', and no change rights for the directory, save those settings, and then set them back to 'administer this server', and FULL rights to change the open directory, save again. and then WAIT until the drives stop going nuts... after that everything works fine.

Login issues with portable home directories

We are using 10.4.8 of the OS X server and version 10.4.7 on the
workstations. Students are unable to login to their PHD. After
entering their username and password, they will get the following
message:
"You are unable to log in to the user account "username" at this time.
Logging in to the accounted failed because an error occurred. The home
folder for the user account is located on an AFP or SMB server. Contact
your system administrator for help."
Knowledge base suggest turning off the fast user switching which I did.
I restarted the machine and received the same message. I have tried
logging in different users on these machines and they are receiving the
same message. I reimaged the machine and that does not appear to help
fix the problem. I can log in to local accounts just fine.
Any ideas?
ibooks, macbooks, imacs, servers Mac OS X (10.4.8) Operating from 10.3.9 - 10.4.8

We ran into this issue too because we forgot to enable the Network Mount for the users. Go to Sharing --> Share Point --> setup the Network Mount as Home Directory Mount.

OSX Clients with portable homes on nfs share on non mac hardware

Hello,
Has anyone already been using an NFS Filer, as EMC VNX, a Netapp or simply a QNAP or other NFS capable device to put the homedirectories for your users on it ?
I've been trying this out now for monthes but without success.
The nfs share should be sys exported eventually with krb5, and all clients should be redirected to that NFS - Sharepoint for their homedirectories in opendirectory.
Server should be Lion with LDAP Master, and the nfs export on an external nfs box.
In lab we tested it, but workgroupmanager quits when trying to create a homedir on the nfs box. (NAS)
Is there a tutorial on how to set that up ? or a whitepaper ?

FWIW: I used the first VAIO's to come out .. then the second lot - We support both Windows and Macs - I had a client who had 'an expert' in Video recommend the Sonys so he bought a few.
They were, in my opinion, the worst video computers I have ever worked with in every single way. It was a real Kludge, the whole thing...- from HW quality through software design, workflow - the lot.. maybe they've improved - but there was a lot of room for it ..:)
I don't think I'd worry too much about the Mac OS running on windows boxen ... it's unlikely to ever work very well or to be a 'mainstream' activity: the 'Mac advantage' is a whole lot more than just the OS in isolation - wonderful tho OS X is...I prefer to think of the huge advantages to Apple of having Windows run on Macs at 'native' speed with Native Apps - It will get a lot of people off the fence and into a Mac. And, as we all know, once you get started down that path, very few ever return *wicked grin*
And yes, the Apple laptops have been the coolest things on the planet for years - IMNSHO... - so is the MacBook Pro - apart from the poor name

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.

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

Portable Home Directories and Login Hooks

We recently switched from Network Home Directories to Portable Home Directories. We used to use login hooks to do all kinds of nifty things to a user's home folder at login, but now it's complicated. I can't figure out at what point in the login+sync process the login hook executes.
If the login hook executes before syncing, then I need to modify the network copy of the home folder, i.e. Network/Servers/servername/.../username. If the login hook executes after syncing, then I need to modify the local copy of the home folder, i.e. /Users/username. Unless I'm mistaken, you can't just use the tilde (~) in the script to denote the path the home folder, so you have to list the path explicitly.
My testing seemed to result in inconsistent behavior. Can anyone give me some guidance?
(Keywords: Loginhook Logouthook Login Script Logout Script Mobility Mobile PHD)

Thank you for the advice, Syth, but I'm already aware of the basics of writing and implementing login and logout hooks. I wrote a lot of them when we were using Network Home Directories. The root of my question has to do with Portable Home Directories and login hooks.
This is a computer lab environment where every user has their own account, network home folder, and "Mobility" preferences set in Workgroup Manager. When a user logs into a lab computer, syncing kicks in and they work from a local copy of their home folder which then syncs to the server at login and logout.
So the core question is: Do login and logout hooks execute before or after login/logout home syncing occurs?
For example, if a user with a brand new network account, i.e. who doesn't even have a network home yet, logs into a computer, what's the order of events? I would hope it would be:
1) server creates network home
2) computer creates local home, i.e. syncs
3) login hook executes
But my testing has been inconsistent. Anyone have any experience or insights to share?

Portable home directory error "Home folder...is not located in the usual p"

I have a small handful of users with portable home directories. Of these, one is getting an error every time she logs onto the workstation: "The home folder for user ~ is not located in the usual place...". Her profile loads just fine, but I suspect it's only the local copy. Last week she didn't mention this mesasge, but did tell me about a problem with her mail; we ended up having to remove and re-create her imap account.
Her workstation is running OS X 10.5.8, as is the server. They're on the same subnet (and even the same switch). Once her profile loads, she can access everything just fine, including her folders and documents.
1. Is there any way to tell whether her local copy is synced with the server? (I'm worried that she's been doing this for several days and they're no longer in sync.)
2. How can I correct this for the future?
3. If the local and server copies are out-of-sync, how do I re-sync them (with the local copy overwriting the server copy)?
Thanks so much!
-Matthew

I encountered this issue recently. My solution was to configure a network home folder for the user, log in at the workstation with the network user account, then turn off and delete the user's home folder on the server.
Note: In my setup, our network users are configured as mobile user accounts so that a local home folder is created at login on the workstation.
Bryan Dulock
Apple Consultants Network
Houston, TX

Sym linked home folders with portable home directories

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