Default application & file associations not remembered on Lion w/ network home folders on Mac Server

[macmanager1]

Hi all,

Just wanted to share a workaround solution I came up regarding Lion clients and OS X Server in case someone else is tearing their hair out over this.

The other week I upgraded a customers site to Lion, and shortly after they noticed that settings such as their default browser which they want as Chrome instead of Safari, and filetype associations such as PDFs to open with Acrobat Professional instead of Preview, etc. were not remembered after restarting.

After a lot of testing I found that it seems to be a bug in Lion when using network home folders hosted via AFP on a Mac Server. Not just Lion Server, but Snow Leopard Server too. Each time the user logs in, the user-defined launch services (which tell the system what the users preferred browser, email application, and which program to open a given filetype with) are ignored and default launch services are used instead.

I found that by running the following command in Terminal, the problem is temporarily resolved:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

So I just created an Automator program to run the above command in Terminal and set it as a Login Item for every Lion user, which seems to have solved the problem for now. Not a serious issue, but an annoying one – hopefully Apple will fix this bug in 10.7.5, but until then this workaround does the trick!

For more info or for those that don’t know how to create an Automator program, I’ve created a page on my web site with a detailed explanation and everything you need to get around this issue here:
http://www.macmanager.com.au/software/lion_network_home_directory_fix.html

Hope this helps! 🙂

Stuart

[Author]

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