Steps to Setup Mobile Homes Properly

[ylon]

I have DNS and Open Directory working it appears without issue, however I’m having some problems setting up Mobile Home users now.

When I go into the Workgroup Manager, create a new users and assign their home to an afp path and give it a local folder path as well, it doesn’t appear to create the path as it says that it will. Then, when I try to login from another computer by simply entering the username and password it says that the home cannot be located or something of that nature.

I’m wondering if I need to create an account somehow similarly as one would with an Active Directory setup with remote home directories such. I’m sure I’m missing some steps.

Could someone please advise as to the proper procedure to make Mobile Homes and so forth work properly?

[ylon]

I am on X.4 entirely (Server and User). Now, I apologize, but I’m very new to OS X Server. When you say make an automount, are you referring to the server and if so could you offer some more explicit instructions. It is almost sounding as if you set up a share on the server under workgroup manager (such as /Users) and then set up an automount on the workstation. Then apparently a new option for mobile account settings makes itself available under the accounts preference pane…. I’m afraid I’m misconstruing everything though.

Thanks much and if this is all covered elsewhere please simply refer me to it as I much appreciate your help and time!

[Anonymous]

You know, those Server Documentation PDF’s have plenty of hand-holding.

You tell the Server that /Users is automounted to clients.

You configure clients to point to the server for authentication.

Now clients will receive those automounts when network users login.

[QUOTE BY= ylon] I am on X.4 entirely (Server and User). Now, I apologize, but I’m very new to OS X Server. When you say make an automount, are you referring to the server and if so could you offer some more explicit instructions. It is almost sounding as if you set up a share on the server under workgroup manager (such as /Users) and then set up an automount on the workstation. Then apparently a new option for mobile account settings makes itself available under the accounts preference pane…. I’m afraid I’m misconstruing everything though.

Thanks much and if this is all covered elsewhere please simply refer me to it as I much appreciate your help and time![/QUOTE]

[ylon]

That’s super. I much appreciate that straightforward answer. I’d not checked the docs yet (for some reason I did not assume that they thorough enough).

Now, if I were to want to create a share out of another share, is that possible? I would like to actually have the Users home the Users on a workstation for a couple of users and am wondering about that now as well… Will probably play with that some here, but just curious if I’m going to run into a problem.

[mheidt]

ylon,

Once you set everything up correctly, could you please make a test for me?

When I logged in on my Powerbook as mobile user, makine a sync and then leaving the network, so that the Server is not reachable anymore, the login into the Powerbook as mobile user takes forever.

Does your mobile user, that doesn’t find the server come up normally or at least within 2 minutes?

[Anonymous]

Hi

I had also had a rough time trying to setup my TiBook with a mobile home. First tinkering aroung with the settings in WGM got me a synced home on the Book.

Then – as I’m also working on my actual Server System with my account configured as network user – it happened, that Tiger created a mobile home on the server system itself as well! Means: The actual Network Homefolder was turned into a Mobile Home. Apparently, Tiger doesn’t check the condition, when logging in as a network user at the server! Trying to reset the settings in WGM to not apply Mobile Home Prefs on my Server wasn’t really bringing me further.

The BIG warning I’d like to give out here is the following:
I tried to get rid of the mobile home config on my server system. For that to happen, you have to login with a local admin (not OD) and then delete the “Mobile User” in the Accounts PrefPane. Cuz the system thinks, the Home is sync’ed and somewhere else on the net, it ACTUALLY DELETES the network homefolder! Luckily I smelled the pitfall and made a backup via the Deleted Users option dmg.

I know, maybe my setup isn’t a typical one encountered in enterprise-like scenarios. But I think there may be others with similar intentions…

[Anonymous]

Hi mic,

Yes, logging in as user on the server itself is a pain in the a&§$ as well.
Your problem can be solved, by setting the mobile-managed-pref-options to machines instead of users or groups. But I agree, that an Apple OS should prevent this.

I had a different problem: Spotlight doesn’t work on the server when logged in as OD-User. It works as admin or on different machines.

Spotlight doesn’t do anything and the finder-find crashes the finder!?

Sometimes I think, OS X Server was developed by M$

[Justin Burns]

This sort of behavior is usually mds going out of whack (I usually see out of memory errors in the log)… A quick kill -1 of the mds process should restore spotlight functionality for your network users. I still have to ssh into users’ machines occasionally and restart their mds.

-justinb

[QUOTE BY= [email protected]] Hi mic,

Yes, logging in as user on the server itself is a pain in the a&§$ as well.
Your problem can be solved, by setting the mobile-managed-pref-options to machines instead of users or groups. But I agree, that an Apple OS should prevent this.

I had a different problem: Spotlight doesn’t work on the server when logged in as OD-User. It works as admin or on different machines.

Spotlight doesn’t do anything and the finder-find crashes the finder!?

Sometimes I think, OS X Server was developed by M$
[/QUOTE]

[DrKdev]

@mheidt:

Yes, logging in as user on the server itself have been fixed in 10.6.
I wasn’t aware of this eventuality, and so make mobility preferences on a per-user basis (for one user.. me.. for testing). Logging into client worked correctly (created the local instance of the user account) and ssh-ing into the server (hmmm… ssh-ing.. not logging into via the login panel… perhaps that’s why I got lucky?) went fine.

cheers.
shawn

[Author]

Posts