Comments on: Portable Home Directories Part 1: What a Mess!

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:01:54 +0000

Philippe,

My only advice is to keep your setup as simple as possible (at least until you get it working), start with new users, use only Apple kit if possible and follow the manual explicitly.

Beyond that it should “just work” from everything I’ve been told. But it never did for me. Of course, I didn’t follow the above advice, so take that for what it’s worth.

Good luck!

-systemsboy

By: Philippe Daoust

Philippe Daoust — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:40:28 +0000

We are using mobile accounts with 10.6.5 and 10.6.6, but each time a user logs on a computer his Documents and Downloads folder are not created ?? I create them manually but not the best way. Home folders are /User/[username] on the startup volume. Any tips ?? Thank you very much !!

By: macguitarman

macguitarman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:59:44 +0000

Answered my own question:

After digging around on the web. Found what I needed to find.

System -> Library -> CoreServices -> Menu Extras

HomeSync.menu, delete the damn thing.

Guess what, the Sync Now no longer shows in the menu bar. Awesome.

I also have found another awesome thing.

TimeMachine.menu. Delete it. No More annoying Time Machine menu that always gets re-created when new AD users login.

I do not use Time Machine in an enterprise Mac environment. I hate the time machine menu bar, inviting users to go to Time Machine open it and turn it on.

We have enterprise level backup, no need for Time Machine.

By: macguitarman

macguitarman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:41:16 +0000

Great article. apple sys engineer myself.

You may have come across this.

Not using an OD server or PHD’s. etc.

But we are mounting SMB home folders on our AD bound Mac OS X clients. Use UNC to drive home folder location

Works fine (but wrong level of the volume) has to be fixed.

This Sync Home now (part of Mobile Account Prefs) is totally annoying. Do not want to Sync.

Is there another way to Turn this Off, short of setting it to Manual and have nothing checked to Sync.

Also, Is there a way to remove the annoying Sync Now menu bar, it’s an invitation to Sync, ridiculous.

There may also be some setting on the AD / Home folders server side, where it can be set to “Not Sync”

thanks,

mgm

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 18:03:03 +0000

Thanks, Kray. Good luck.

-systemsboy

By: kray

kray — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 16:34:54 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion. However, I’ve tried an alias. They don’t work either. I kept thinking that their _must_ be some kind of preference in the mobility prefs, they allow for this. But I have been looking for weeks and just can’t figure this out. No one on the apple support list seems to be replying, so I appreciate your, “I really couldn’t say”. If I ever come up with a solution, I’ll post it here.

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:59:47 +0000

I really couldn’t say with any certainty at all why a symbolic link would fail to copy using PHDs. You might try a Mac-style alias, however, and see if that works. Perhaps PHDs just don’t understand *nix-style symlinks.

Worth a shot, anyway. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.

-systemsboy

By: kray

kray — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:21:40 +0000

I have a user who, for space limitations, has a symbolic link in his local home directory (on a macbook pro) that points to an external drive. So far I have been unable to figure out how to get his symbolic link to sync with his network account. I have him set up with a portable home that works just fine (except for the symbolic link.

Seems like I need a option similar to what rsync has that causes the sync agent to follow symbolic links.

Is this possible?

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:59:50 +0000

So you’re saying that, when sync conflicts occur, you want the popup to not appear and the conflicts to be automatically resolved using the most recently modified version.

No, I don’t know of a way to achieve this, with login hooks or otherwise. I would guess you’d need to modify something fairly low-level to pull it off.

Again, it’s been some time since I’ve looked at this functionality, and you might want to take a closer look, but if there is no Apple-sanctioned way to set that preference, I would probably advise against messing with it.

-systemsboy

By: School Tech

School Tech — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:46:53 +0000

I am setting up around 300 computers for a school district I work in. The teachers are a bit overwhelmed when a new system is put in place and reading instructions doesn’t seem to be a priority. I am afraid that when sync conflicts arise they will have a hard time determining what to do. I have decided I would like to default the sync prefs to Keep the most recent modification date. However there isn’t a choice in Workgroup Manager to do this automatically. Is there some kind of login hook script and/or logout hook script that can produce these results??? Thanks for any help….