Using another drive for /Users on 10.4 server

[Jason]

Recently I added an XServe Raid to my production XServe (Milhouse) @ work running 10.4.3 server. Aside from many other things I wanted my users’ directories to be stored on the Raid and not the local boot drive. After reading some threads I decided to go the simple symlink route but I am running into problems and they appear to be a bit inconsistent thus I turn to my afp548 friends for a little guidance.

Milhouse is the main server at the office and it handles the AFP shares for most of the departments (all Mac) as well as provides athentication via LDAP for other servers (Mail (linux), dev server (linux), afp server (panther) and a few others. The mail server uses autohome and creates a local (on linux machine) account for the mail user so I only have to manage users on Milhouse. This works really well and the autohome on the mail server is flexible meaning I can easily change the path of the Users home directory and things will work just fine.

I have a symlink that points /Users -> /Volumes/Raid1/Users on Milhouse (my XServe)

In WGM when I create a new user their home diretory is showing that is it /Network/Servers/milhouse.mydomain.com/Users/[user] which is what I want (I believe). At this point most things are operational. Here is the list:

– User can log into Milhouse via AFP and access mount points.
– User can log into mail and linux servers
– User can log onto any computer setup for remote home directories, however occasionally it complains that home dir is not available.
– User CANNOT access home dir on any linux machine
– User CANNOT mount their own home dir from Milhouse

If I change the user’s home directory on Milhouse to point to /Network/Servers/milhouse.mydomain.com/Volumes/Raid1/Users everything works perfectly w/ the exception of the remote home directories when logging into machines around the office. In this case the home dir is simply not available and the machine complains about it so.

I know I’m really close or just missing something painfully obvious. Any ideas?

[tdelporto]

I had a similar desire and wound up editing /etc/fstab thus:

LABEL=volumes /Users/volumes hfs rw,auto 1 2

where “volumes” is the label of the LUN on our XRaid I’m storing user home directories in. You’d probably do something like:

LABEL=RAID1 /Users hfs rw,auto 1 2

[pingu]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: tdelporto[/u][p]I had a similar desire and wound up editing /etc/fstab thus:

LABEL=volumes /Users/volumes hfs rw,auto 1 2

where “volumes” is the label of the LUN on our XRaid I’m storing user home directories in. You’d probably do something like:

LABEL=RAID1 /Users hfs rw,auto 1 2[/p][/QUOTE]

When you do this, does ‘RAID1’ still show up on the Desktop as well as mounting at /Users?

I’m trying to do similar, but on client machines for PHDs, but the ‘User-Homes’ volume we’re mounting to /Users also shows on the Desktop which is a lttle confusing for the users. Do you knwo any way to prevent this?

Dan

[Author]

Posts