Mobile Home Directories without Tiger Server

[Justin Burns]

Hey everyone, just thought I would start to document my configuration here for the benefit of anyone else considering something similar.

I work at a company with about 50 OS X workstations, which we use for Point of Sale stations as well as workstations for everyone. Currently everyone is on Network Home Directories, but any kind of network problems make every computer in the building freeze up. If the downtime is more than a few seconds, afp connections to home dirs get cut. We had a switch fail recently, and the first replacement we purchased liked to reboot itself, so this has come up more than a few times.

I would also like to add another level of redundancy to the users’ home directory data, rather than having it solely on the server (which can be centrally backed up, but still). Being able to exclude ~/Music will also be a huge time and space saver (I keep an eye on home directory sizes and will migrate people’s music to their hard drive if they get more than a gig or two of music ripped, but it’s an ongoing t ask that I would just as soon not have to do)

Here’s the main catch: we’re still running Panther Server, though almost all of the clients are now on 10.4.2. I would assume that all the information that mobile account clients need is stored in LDAP, so with the 10.3.9 schema changes to Panther Server, everything should be A-OK. However I didn’t want to take the chance of corrupting information on my production server, so I have been running all of this through on my test network.

My main concern is using the 10.4 server tools on 10.3 server. I need access to the extra rules for mobile accounts in WGM, so I have to use the new tools. I haven’t read anything anywhere from anyone saying they have done this.

Well, so far so good. I’m able to configure my server with the 10.4 tools, and the settings are respected by 10.4 clients and safely ignored by the 10.3 clients. I did receive an error trying to delete a computer from the Mobile Computers list in WGM, but getting popup errors in WGM is not too uncommon. I was able to remove the computer’s group from the “All Computers” list so that works for me.

Nothing has blown up yet, I am about to start a small deployment to a couple clueful users and see how it goes.

Now I just need to decide which method to use to enable ~/Library sync’ing…

-justinb

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