Portable Home Accounts Not Syncing

sean
Valued Contributor

Hey, not a Casper question, but something that Jonah suggested I posted.

I notice that there have been posts from other users using Portable Home Accounts and as such, can only think that others have had to work around this.

I have configured a Golden Triangle set up, with almost all Apple Schema configurations working as expected (currently I am managing users with users groups in OD). Our home accounts are actually stored on a Linux server, so available via nfs automounts. I can control the users environment, dock, screensaver, etc, enforce authentication of external drives, which System Preferences are available, etc, and I can manually sync the users home account to the nfs home account. However, on log in and log out, no sync was taking place.

I eventually came across the idea that an attribute was missing in the local DS of the client machine and it would need to be added.

/usr/bin/dscl . create /Users/$USERNAME dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory "<home_dir><url>nfs://[NFS export path]</url><path>[user name]</path></home_dir>"

This in turn would also require adding this to the list of attributes.

/usr/bin/dscl . append /Users/[user name] dsAttrTypeNative:preserved_attributes dsAttrTypeStandard:OriginalHomeDirectory

Clearly one way to get around this, is to create a log in hook to provide this attribute, but then the user wont exist prior to needing to create this, so each time a user is logging into a machine they haven't used before, they would need to log in twice (once to create the users settings, with the above added, and then the second time to do the sync now that the details for this have been created).

I've submitted a bug report to Apple, but I'm kind of expecting a 'We know about this, so we wont let you know what we are doing" kind of response and of course they've moved on to Snow Leopard.

What I'd really be interested to know, seeing as there seems to be almost nothing on the web related to this and lots of people are using PHDs, if anyone out there didn't have to do this to get home syncing to work and if so what are the basics of your configuration.

Our clients are running 10.5.8 and the server is at the moment on 10.5.5

Thanks for any information anyone can provide.

Sean

1 REPLY 1

Not applicable

I'd post this on the Apple OS X admin list as well.

- JD