Mobility Configuration

[ylon]

I am about to embark on using Mobility on Leopard Server and am not certain as to the “proper” steps to do so. I’ve reviewed documentation and it seems somewhat straightforward, but it still is something that I’d like to get some information on from some seasoned admins before jumping into it. Can someone provide a bullet point list of what one needs to do in order to set up mobile homes properly on Leopard Server?

Plus I have a few existing accounts that will need to be converted over as well and one that has a bit of merging from two different machines. I’m a pretty seasoned veteran of *nix, but I just am not completely certain as to the proper procedure here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[ylon]

Thanks so much for the reply MacTroll.

On the server what are the pros and cons of setting Mobility configuration per user, per group, per computer or per computer group?

For example, I don’t have a huge number of users (8) on our network. I have seen brief discussion of this before on macgeekery.com and the documentation doesn’t really seem to pin anything down with certainty or give usage scenarios (unless I’m missing that somewhere).

Also, I took the server from the standard config to advanced (seems like the only way we can do mobility configuration from what I gathered) and apparently now DNS config is no longer needed (using a linux DNS server at the head of the network)?

And what is this now “officially” called in Leopard Server, Mobility? It seems that previously it has been referred to as Mobile Homes, etc.

[ylon]

I did have some success in following your steps. Thought I had all set properly, the “Sync
Home Now” menu items appears in the menubar and it steps through all apparent folders that are set in the Workgroup Manager preferences for the user, but no sync occurs (tested by making some changes on the server side user account when logged in and the changes do not propagate back over to the remote client).

I tried to delete the user a few times and reset this back up (the command I used: `createmobileaccount -vsn username -h /Users/username`), however the same results each time. I even went so far as to allow Mac OS X to create the account and try the sync from a new managed account while moving the older user files to another folder under /Users with similar results.

The output of the createmobileaccount command as called above are:
–BEGIN COMMAND OUTPUT–
createmobileaccount built Oct 2 2007 22:44:49
verbose output on.
user name = “username”
home path = “/Users/username”
user password = “(null)”
prompt for password = FALSE
encrypt new home = FALSE
create as external account = TRUE
home sync new account = TRUE
sync URL = “(null)”

/usr/bin/dscl -raw . -read /Users/username RealName RecordName GeneratedUID UniqueID PrimaryGroupID NFSHomeDirectory HomeDirectory dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalNFSHomeDirectory
dsAttrTypeStandard:GeneratedUID: 1B367422-7683-473F-816A-BE82C69C1DB3
dsAttrTypeStandard:NFSHomeDirectory: /Users/username
dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalNFSHomeDirectory: /Users/username
dsAttrTypeStandard: PrimaryGroupID: 20
dsAttrTypeStandard:RealName:
Some User
dsAttrTypeStandard:RecordName:
username
Some User
dsAttrTypeStandard:UniqueID: 1025
No such key: dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory
No such key: HomeDirectory
–END COMMAND OUTPUT–

Please do advise as this seems to be a serious and [b][u]urgent[/u][/b] impasse at the moment.

I would also like to set up the account so that the user synchronization occurs differently for each machine that will be used (ie, there is 1 desktop and 1 laptop aside from the server on which these accounts reside for this one particular user). Thus I’d like to exclude certain folders (such as /Pictures and iPhoto for the laptop mobile account and so forth, while grabbing all on the desktop) and it appears that the ability to change these synchronization settings are grayed out for the times this appeared to work, yet did not. I also only had set for the user preferences on Workgroup Manager to manage the Account Creation -> Always for this particular user. Perhaps Machine/Computer Names need to be set up instead for things to work right? I would not be surprised that I’m missing something on the server side that may be preventing things to sync properly.

Thanks much!

[Author]

Posts