Remote home dirs on Tiger Server

[zamoose]

Howdy all,
I’m just about ready to pull my hair out over this one. I’ve struggled and struggled and am unable to come up with a solution to our issue.

We have an existing Solaris file server that serves up users’ home directories to Linux, Solaris and Windows desktops. We bought an Xserve and want to give Mac users the same opportunity. I’ve messed about with NFSManager and attempted to set up automounts on the Xserve (i.e., mount an exported /home/user from the Solaris server as /Network/Servers/servername/user) but that adamantly refuses to work.

In frustration, we’ve purchased a few licenses for KAShare from Xinet, which allows the exporting of Solaris directories via an AFP implementation. However, I don’t even know where to start now.

Please, any pointers on how to autmount users’ home directories on a server other than the OpenDirectory master would be greatly, GREATLY appreciated, be it via AFP, NFS or otherwise.

Thanks.

[deemery]

Ooh, this is exactly what I’m looking for! But I’m afraid I’ll need -a bit- more help than Macshome provided. In my case, I want to run OS X Tiger Server on one machine, and use another machine running Plain Old OS X Tiger as the machine holding all of the /Home directories. (Why, you ask? Well three reasons: 1, I don’t want my home directories on the same machine as all of the internet gateway services, in case of penetrations, Denial of Service attacks, etc. 2. I have a lot more drives on another machine, and I don’t want to "give that one up" as the server. This is a home office network with a total of 4 macs and a token PC. 3. OS X Server ain’t cheap, even from eBay, and I’d rather not have to buy a second copy…)

Part of what I’m concerned about is a Race Condition about the order I boot up the machines.

More detailed help -gratefully appreciated!!-

dav

[chrisjasper]

As Macshome stated, use WGM (Workgroup Manager), make sure your OSX server is set up as an Open Directory Master create the user accounts and on the home directory tab for each user account, specify the path to the directory.
Make sure the user actually has permission to the folder and you should be fine.

You can use the other mac without too many problems, as long as you add the LDAP setting for the OD Master to it so that authentication works.
Although there is a limit to the number of users that are allowed to connect to a standard OSX machine for file sharing, 4 or 5 should be okay.

You should find that you can specifiy the solaris box for the home directories though, but I’m not entirely sure how you set up the authentication between the OD Master and the Solaris box.

As for the order, the OD Master needs to come up first, so that you have authentication for the home directories and the client macs. then the Home Directory machine, If your clients cant get authentication for the home directories they will be unable to login to the client Macs as they have to have a home directory.

[deemery]

Well, with some substantial help, I got Tiger Server running in the normal configuration. To help explain what I want, let me put names to machines:

davebert runs Tiger Server
janus runs Tiger
wyvern runs Tiger

What I want to do is log into any machine, through LDAP, etc on davebert (that part is working), but have the home directories be served by Janus (that’s where I’m having the problem).

I understand how to set the home directory, but I’m not sure how to get the various automounting to work:

1. How do I set it up on davebert so davebert will allow me to specify afp://janus.local/Users/{me} as the home directory for {me}?

2. Is there anything special I have to do on the clients (janus and wyvern) when I log in as {me} ?

Thanks AGAIN in advance for the help.

dave[code][/code]

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