Peter Beninate and I spent a couple hours trying to get my corrupted Leopard Server installation back straight. Here’s my take-aways. Now to you Server old hands, this is all probably obvious, but this might help some neophytes out there…

1. When in doubt, you can clear all the Open Directory/accounts stuff through Server Admin -> Open Directory -> Settings -> General and changing the role from Open Directory Master to Standalone. (We had some leftover home directory mount points that cleared up.)

Also you can back up everything from Workgroup Manager (WGM) by exporting your Open Directory settings from Server Admin; works much better than doing this in WGM.

2. It’s important to get the ordering right when creating mount points for Home directories:
a. make sure Workgroup Manager is NOT running (may be overkill, but we did see WGM crash once)
b. create the mount point in Server Admin.
c. THEN launch Workgroup Manager, and the new home directory mount point should show up in the list of mounts.

3. Similarly, you need to follow steps a..c above for a Groups home. Groups home directories should have Enable Automount for Home Directories checked.

4. If you have a laptop with an existing non-LDAP account that you want to convert to a Server Mobile Account, here’s how to do it. This is based on an invaluable hint posted a while ago here (and referenced elsewhere on the Web…)

a. The UID number is significant. I don’t know an easy way to set that in Leopard ‘client’.
b. -completely back up the home directory. (I use Synk)
c. delete the account on the laptop.
d. create the account on the server as a standard network account.
e. log onto the server-based account on the laptop.
f. go to your backup and do ‘chown’ to get the user and group identities on the backup copy to match those on new network account.
g. log out of the network account.
h. on the server, now change the account to a Mobile account. In particular: Highlight the account, then click on the Preferences button at the top of the WGM window. Click on Mobility in the Preferences pane. On the Creation tab, set “Manage” to “Always”, and check the ‘create mobile account” and “with synching off”. On the Options tab, I left “Manage” there set to “Never”. Hit Apply Now.
j. Now go back to the laptop and log in. You’ll get asked to create the mobile account.
k. Once you’re logged into the fresh new Mobile account on the laptop, restore/copy back the files from the backup in step b (with the corrected UID/GID from step f.)
j. When all that’s done, log out of the account, just to freshen/apply settings changes you restored. If asked, best to NOT synch at this time.
k. Log back into the laptop mobile account one more time. If everything’s hunky-dory, then go to System Preferences -> Accounts. Press the Mobile Settings button, update the settings there (e.g. how often to synch.) Now you’re ready to hit the “synch now” button.

5. If mobile account synching isn’t copying everything correctly, delete ~/.FileSync/* on -both- the laptop and the server, and then sync again. That sync will take a while, but it’ll reset its status.

And a question: Any suggestions/hints for making mobile account synching work faster?

Hope this helps someone out there…. And if I’ve missed something (or gotten something wrong), please correct me.

dave