Comments on: Portable Home Directories Part 2: Oh God, Make it Stop

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:37:08 +0000

Greg,

Thanks! I have actually read your site since abandoning all hope of actually using PHDs in our lab. It’s really useful for understanding what’s going on in the background with PHDs.

The fix you propose in your article is, as you say, ugly indeed. I too would call that a bug, or at least a bad implementation. Still, if I get a chance I may give it a try, just to see if I can get it working.

Thanks again!

-systemsboy

By: Greg Neagle

Greg Neagle — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:24:46 +0000

We’re using mobile accounts and PHDs with NFS homes on NetApps. Almost all of our laptop users are using mibile accounts + PHDs, and some of our desktop users are as well.

It’s not perfect, but works pretty well. I think your issue where automatic syncing wasn’t working with NFS homes might be described here with a workaround:
http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/leopard-mobileaccounts-and-nfs-homes/

-Greg

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:53:53 +0000

Thanks Patrick! Sounds like good info.

I do plan on revisiting PHDs at some point. I will include your log info as well as some other links and information I’ve found along the way.

It’s reassuring to hear that others are experiencing oddities as well. Looks like there are still some kinks in the PHD system, and not just with non-standard installations.

Thanks again.

-systemsboy

By: Patrick Lee

Patrick Lee — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:31:34 +0000

We have PHDs set up for most of our staff and on the most part, it’s working pretty well though we have a standard OS X Server setup with OD and AFP home directories though we’ve had our fair share of sync conflicts that just pop out of nowhere.

One thing I’d recommend is to make sure that your local account doesn’t have the same username as the one on the server. What I’ve done before is delete the local account record then rename/rechown the local home directory to the usernae of the network account. When you try syncing after that, you get a prompt asking you where the last modified files are located.

If you ever mess around with PHDs again, the logs at ~/Library/Logs/FileSyncAgent.log and /Library/Logs/FileSyncAgent/FileSyncAgent-verbose.log are really useful. They can be a little dense but they give way more info than the FileSyncAgent GUI.

By: systemsboy

systemsboy — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:02:20 +0000

Yeah, the caching has always been a bit much for my tastes, even in 10.4. I’m not quite sure why Apple is so aggressive with the caching. (And isn’t cache supposed to get checked and cleared regularly or on changes?) 10.5 seems to have made great strides in refreshing cache overall, but when it comes to PHDs it’s like the Tiger days. There is no apparent way to clear the settings from the client Mac. And that’s pretty damned annoying.

I may try your method if I ever decide to mess with PHDs again. Thanks!

-systemsboy

By: Mike Kingsley

Mike Kingsley — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:27:38 +0000

Yeah it’s unfortunate when there are issues out there. I have also ran into caching issues with just general MCX settings where I have had to a sudo dscacheutil -flushcache to fix things. So not just a PHD issue.

I have had some luck in the past with PHD (when a user already had a local account) by creating the “new” account first by logging on through the server, then logging back out in a different local admin account and changing the local folder to the new created PHD account. Then with log back in and do the menu bar sync.