Stopping a mobile account from syncing when off site

[willpearce]

Hi all,

Was wondering if anyone has a method for stopping mobile accounts on laptops from syncing when the user is off site. We have users that use dial up or travel to weird and wonderful places and managing syncing for those users has proven to be challenging.

So far we have a ‘portables’ syncing group that does a full sync on login / logout and manual background syncs. So this allows the user either cancel the login /logout sync or login and then connect to the internet. It’s a pretty lame solution – we are educating our users to cancel the sync and they often just get the impression that syncing is an error and to always cancel it. Which completely defeats the purpose of syncing.

I’ve considered putting a firewall rule in place on the directory server that blocks whatever port it is that the sync process uses. I’m told that this has been tried before and just results in really really long login times as the sync process tries and tries again to connect to it’s directory server.

Does anyone have a similar situation? Ideally I’d like the clients to sync when on campus and never sync when off campus with no user input.

We’re using 10.5 clients with a 10.4 directory server using OD.

Any advice or ideas will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Will

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