Best practices for network users using iMacs

[MrBingham917]

Hello all-

I'd like to know the best way to handle network users who have a home directory on a file server. As it stands right now, we have them logging into bound iMacs with their network accounts, their home directory gets pushed down to the machine. This has caused issues with using certain applications (I'm looking at you Acrobat! *glare*), and causes the network Library/Printers folder to become overpopulated with printers each and every time they print.

To fix this, I was going to enable the "Force local home directory on startup disk", this seems to alleviate the printers folder, and the finnicky applications. In my haste, I made the mistake of pushing this setting out to our assistant to the head of school, it seemed easy enough to have her save her work into the network folders on her dock, but that is a little too cumbersome for her.

What I'm asking basically is, what do you guys do for situations like this? Also, for the "force local..." option, is there a way to have a process run at logout that would copy the contents of the local desktop/documents folders and move them to the appropriate network folder on the file server.

Thanks
Robert Bingham. wearin too many hats right now....

[lisacherie]

To get adobe working with network homes, take a look at MCX cache redirection. By default caches will attempt to be written to the network home which is not what you want - space limitations, latency, excessive read/writes to network storage - so redirect cache to write to the local disk via mcx folder redirection on login and cleanup on logout.

I wrote up a post about this a while ago to remember what I did when looking at similar issues. Some of the adobe apps are just not meant to be used with a network home. Here is what I did:

http://lisacherie.com/?p=33 (re-packaging CS5 to sort of work with network homes)
http://lisacherie.com/?p=19 (cache redirection)

good luck :)