Mac Geekery

I have talked up my Mac mini running OS X Server quite a bit in regards to how I use it as the center of my home entertainment center, but I never really touched on why I use OS X Server. The mini is a great little beast, and I use it heavily. Aside from running Front Row on it via a neat little hack, it also acts as my sandbox webserver, my torrent box, and my backup server.

Mobile Homes

Tiger Server reintroduced the most beloved and missed feature of ASIP – portable checkout – and updated it to modern times. Mobile Homes, as it is now called, uses SyncServices to keep a copy of your home directory synchronized between your computer and the server, and it actually works as advertised. Mostly.

Server Install and Client Setup

For Mobile Homes, your OS X Server must be an Open Directory Master. If you installed Server without this option, it is possible to “promote” the server to Master status, but I’ve never had the need to do it, so don’t ask me. And here you thought I was the expert.

On the client computer, use the Directory Access application to add the server under LDAPv3. Unless you did something wrong, the client and server will talk to each other and the client configures itself correctly. Prior to Tiger, you needed to know the Search Base for the LDAP directory, but nowadays Directory Access is smart enough to figure that out for you.

Workgroup Manager

The real fun happens in Workgroup Manager. I have all my shares on an external Lacie mini disk. First things first, I went into Shares and disabled the default Homes share and created a new one on my external. Once shared, go to the Network Mount tab and designate this share to be used for User Home Directories. Create a new user for yourself, selecting the AFP mount under Home.

For Mobile Home, you must do some MCX (Managed Client for OS X) magic. There are three domains to manage – User, Group, and Machine. Choose one. I manage at the Machine level, as I use Mobile Homes to sync home directories on my iMac, my PowerBook, and my wife’s PowerBook. In my case, I added each machine’s MAC address to a machine group and then went to preferences for that machine group.

Mobility

All of the real magic happens under Mobility. Most of this panel is self explanatory – you turn it on and you set a schedule. The only wild card is the Rules tab. If any of the client machines are wireless, I strongly suggest auditing their home directory for large files and folders and configuring rules to either exclude these folders or, at least, common large media files. For instance, I exclude ~/Music, ~/Movies, and *.dmg.

Login

I might suggest managing the Login Window as well, so that the Network Users show up in the panel’s userlist.

There is no step 3…

Log in as the Network user and start moving your data over from your old home directory.