[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!

[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]

FYI, here is the 17 March announcement of support for Tiger on the OpenAFS mailing list:

http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-announce/2006/000145.html

This could prove a very interesting experiment by the AFP548 folks and the community!

[ylon]

Thanks much for the reply. Yes, that is certainly a large number of failures. I’m starting to wonder if there is something wrong with our geographical region in terms of some sort of electromagnetic fields! I just had a laptop hard drive go bad on my while on a business trip this week with bad blocks!!! Very, very disturbing.

Do you think that it would be more wise to set up a software RAID-5 Linux server and then serve that via NFS to a Mac OS X Server and then in turn serve everything out from there?

If not, and going with straight hardware RAID 5 for OS X, what is recommended? I’d certainly like to get something that I can expand quite a bit, but also not break the bank.

Anyone looked into or used OpenAFS on Mac OS X since that is apparently workable on OS X?

Thanks much.

[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.

[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!

[ylon]

It doesn’t look like much work has been done in the way of testing out BackupPC by folks in these forums (I being guilty as well since it would have required a little initial setup) and thought I should bring this to the forefront.

It seems that this might be an ideal solution for us as it gives a nice interface to rsync/ssh or hfstar I believe as well. Given this, it would be very handy to have a backup server offsite (or take them offsite as your protocol may demand) and keep the backup on hard drives (due to the aforementioned benefits). It seems that even this option could be far quicker than tapes in most scenarios and, apparently, you can have a nice differential if you need to go back to changes from a specific date given in the threshold you define…

A thought that perhaps we should all more thoroughly explore.

[ylon]

Yes, I’m very excited about BackupPC as well. I wish someone would cover setting it up on Mac OS X in detail. What I’m wanting to do is to maintain backups of a linux web server as well as a Mac OS X Tiger Server. Please share if you have success!

The thing that seemed to stump me was getting rsync to tunnel across ssh properly even though I can do that manually it didn’t work right out of the gate so I set it on the shelf for a bit.

Hope to hear some more this soon!

[ylon]

It appears, crossing my fingers, that a permissions repair and a restart of named has fixed the issue… Hmm.

[ylon]

Thanks for those links. Looks like good information! However neither of those options appear to adaptively add ip addresses to a deny list… Am I missing a detail somewhere while reading over those sites or is there yet another option out there?

[ylon]

Wow, that link looks very helpful, but it makes me quite nervous… I am definitely planning to upgrade to Tiger once it is available (I’m and ADC member and such right now, but I’ve not played with the current Tiger Server build) and going to exim and these other pkgs worries me with regards to a clean upgrade.

At the moment my current system will allow usernames such as [email protected] and [email protected], is this accomplishable by Tiger upgrade-compatible methods in Panther Server?

Or if I jump in and use the packages available at that link, will I have a big mess once I decide to upgrade to Tiger Server?

I’m definitely interested in the ClamAV and SpamAssassin functionality as that’s what I currently have in place and must keep that…

Thanks for your help!

[ylon]

Derrick, this appears to be a very similar issue (or identical) to mine. Did you find a satisfactory answer? I definitely cannot (nor can I have others) going through that tedious process for each e-mail account when there may be 10 or more e-mail addresses for each virtual domain.

[Author]

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