Best Practices: Home Directory on Primary Workstation?

[ChrisOwens]

I would like to set up an environment under Leopard in which each user’s home directory is hosted on his or her primary workstation, but is also accessible as a network home from other machines via afp.

What is a reasonable way to set up the directory entries so that when the user logs in on a miscellaneous machine, the home directory will auto-mount, but when he or she logs in to the primary workstation, the workstation won’t go nuts trying to mount its own fileshares?

Beyond “reasonable”, what’s a standard way of doing this?

[luke]

You could have each workstation share its own /Users directory to all other computers but putting them all into OpenDirectory as mounts. When you create a user in Workgroup Manager, you’ll be able to choose the home directory store that will be used, and you should see all of them from each workstation. The user’s home directory will be saved as /Network/Servers/primary.workstation.organization.com/Users/username/. On a workstation that is not their primary workstation, that directory will be available over AFP. On the primary workstation, that directory will be available because it will be symlinked to the actual /Users directory.

Autofs and automounter are both smart enough to NOT mount /Network/Servers/hostname/ from the server itself. Tiger could do this for everything in /Network, but leopard seems to only do this for the server’s entry in /Network/Servers

Of course, a much more reasonable way of doing this would be to use mobile home directories. Not only will you avoid home directory access over the network, you’ll still have them centralized on the server to make backups easy.

[ChrisOwens]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: luke[/u][…] The user’s home directory will be saved as /Network/Servers/primary.workstation.organization.com/Users/username/. On a workstation that is not their primary workstation, that directory will be available over AFP. On the primary workstation, that directory will be available because it will be symlinked to the actual /Users directory. [/QUOTE]

The symlinking is what I don’t understand.. where does the magic happen? if I’m logged into primary.ws.org.com, what is it that causes /Network/Servers/primary.ws.org.com/Users to be symlinked to /Users? Should I manually create this? I was under the belief that manually messing with anything in /Network/Servers was un-Kosher.

Aside, it is, as you point out, probably more reasonable to use a central home directory server and portable home directories on all the user machines. Problem is, my available server for that purpose is a Linux machine, and the Linux afp server (netatalk) seems to have a hard time with OS X permissions and ACLs.

[edit: D’OH!!!!!! If I had not made a typo in my DNS zone records, all would have been fine a day ago. The symlinking magic happens, but only if the name of the Mount record in OD exactly matches (including case) the FQDN of the host. It was the case sensitivity that got me]

[luke]

Good to know…

There is definitely some magic here which is not well documented, and it works differently in Leopard as opposed to Tiger. See my other post here which addresses this sort of issue with other static mounts in /Network

https://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=19225

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