Apps dont work for users with moved home dirs

[Lindsay Robertso]

I’ve moved 10 users home directories from our Novell server to a new 10.6 server.
The can login fine but several apps are giving problems

Endnote x2 wil run but cant open a library, or create a new one
Safari just crashes with no error
MS Office apps complain about the office database being broken – but the DB utility cant fix it.

I copied the home dirs by:
Create user on osx server
Authenticate to Novell server as admin
cp -R source target
chown -R owner folder/

I’ve tried everything i can think of but am stuck now
i tried:
deleting preferences and application support files
reinstalling apps
repairing permissions
propagating permissions in Server Admin
deleting the usercode and recreating it with the same name

Hellp!

[Lindsay Robertso]

I can fix most of the problems by renaming the entire Library folder for each of the moved users and then just replacing mail, calendar and browser stuff.

But Safari still wont work, it bounces in the dock and then just stops.

firefox, camino and chrome all work ok…

l.

[yagmot]

what happens when you try to use safari as a local user or a network user with an empty home folder? it sounds like the permissions are messed up on the ~/Library folder and that safari can’t write its preference file.

when moving the users’ home folders, try using “sudo cp -Rp …” to preserve the file attributes. if that doesn’t work try creating an archive (with tar, bzip2 or whatever) of the home folder and then decompressing that where ever you want to move it to.

[Lindsay Robertso]

If I make a new user, safari works.
If I just remove the moved users ~/Library, safari crashes.

Bizarre.

l.

ps, thanks for the tip with using cp…

[speedbuggy]

If you haven’t fixed it already .. To make Safari work right .. you need to push out via WGM a preference to all your macs that reads “WebIconDatabaseEnabled boolean false”. I put it under the Always branch and it’ll work properly now ..

Cheers

[Author]

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