Slightly off topic, I'd like to ask this very knowledgeable list for advice.
I'm tasked with designing a new mac concept for my uni. I've been working for over a year implementing a Casper solution for my uni. Casper all works fine, and we're confident in providing the imaging/installing/updating/preferences-services through Casper Suite. My biggest problem is how to provide users with home folder.
All clients will be bound to AD for authentication. The AD also provides a home folder using SMB located at a high profile SAN/windows cluster solution, all very well setup.
The problem is that the design specs require us to provide the possibility to use more than one computer, and switch between macs and windows pcs. To be able to provide that, we designed the system using PHD. Under SL that worked rather bad using SMB home folders so we used a "golden triangle" and used a SL server and an xserve RAID to provide home folders for PHD and using SSFT to speed sync up and SMB sharing to provide the windows clients home folders. Only users interested in using macs were migrated to the SL server.
This system was more or less a test system, and we're now designing the "real thing".
This system will use Lion as the client OS as new computers are coming in every day and we cannot stick to SL.
We would very much like to skip providing home folders within the mac project and would rather use the SMB home folders already in place.
Testing this out with Lion is not very promising as we immediately run into this bug:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15678516
which is still present in 10.7.2 (all home folders provided are using the $ as they are "hidden") but many folders show up as there a group folders and whatnots also in place at the windows cluster, so the user gets the "choose share"-popup and their home folder is not in the list as it is hidden. Even un-hiding the users home folder seems to upset PHD somewhat.
We might have to go back to providing our own home folders, but frankly, Lion server isn't really all that it's cracked up to be ;) We have servers available, with access to an EMC SAN and everything, but there's no way, afaik, to provide home folders with redundant servers running Lion server (or any other version of OSXS) which is not very popular with the IT organization.
Using a backed up home folder is not acceptable as per design specs.
So, my question to the list is; how are you all providing home folders for your users?
Regards
Patrik Sonestad, Lund University, Sweden.
