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Greetings,
After setting up the server and “playing” with the users and their problems, I’m coming to this question :
What if all my users had mobile accounts ? Why should I use PHDs in some cases and Mobile in others ? How do I choose ?
Fo example, one user’s laptop may not have all the same apps as his desktop mac, but with PHD I’m not able (is it possible ?) to have him keeping two different Dock setups. Will this work on a Mobile account or is there a way to “limit sync with PHDs ?
Thanks !
“What if all my users had mobile accounts ? Why should I use PHDs in some cases and Mobile in others ? How do I choose ?”
Portable home directories work directly off the server, so users can log in to multiple machines and changes are instantly reflected between them. This is important if users SSH to other hosts and expect to have access to their files. The downside is that you can’t really do this with laptops because it requires a network connection at all times.
Mobile home directories keep everything locally on the hard drive. This is usually faster and it allows them to disconnect from the network and continue to have access to their files. If they log in from multiple computers though, each computer will have its own version of their home directory, and changes on one won’t be reflected on the others until they sync back to the server (at which point there will likely be conflicts).
I am still looking for the perfect combination of these two concepts. The closest I’ve come is Coda (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/), but there’s little chance of integrating that with a Mac environment.
“one user’s laptop may not have all the same apps as his desktop mac, but with PHD I’m not able (is it possible ?) to have him keeping two different Dock setups.”
It works best if you image the laptops so they all have identical installations of the OS and applications. I use Radmind for this. As for keeping different Dock setups, you could exclude ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Dock.plist from syncing so that each computer has its own Dock settings.
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