Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Network Home Folder (on Home Network)

H

Hazer

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I'd like one Mac to have its home folder located on another, and accessed across the wireless network. Here's the situation:

iMac G5
iBook G4
both running 10.4.x

iMac is in the windowless gloomy basement, where I use the horsepower and the big screen for rendering movies, DVD creation, etc, etc. For more mundane tasks, I like to sit in the cheery open living room with the iBook.

The iBook is sometimes shared with other family members, so I don't have consistent access to it, and I hate trying to maintain data across two machines. Which mail folder is up to date? Where the %^&* is that file?

So I'd like to have an account that accesses my home folder on the iMac. I don't need to access from both Macs at once, so if the price to pay is single login from one machine at a time, that's fine.

And I'd like to do it without buying Server. I don't need multiple licenses, and the cost of OS X Server is halfway towards a new MacBook anyway.

Can it be done?

Thanks-

Sean
 
For network home folders you unfortunately have to buy Server. But you probably wouldn't want to use network home folders over a wireless connection... unless you REALLY love that spinning beachball.

There are other things you could do to alleviate some of your pain. One would be to switch your email to IMAP (assuming you're using POP3). Another would be to set up an AFP share on the iMac that both the iMac and iBook tap into - for example when you save a file on the iBook you deliberately save it to the share on the iMac instead of your Desktop or whatever. If you use Firefox on both machines, keep bookmarks in sync with something like Foxmarks. Etc.

I have a similar situation and I have a folder on my *main machine* called Outbox (It's actually technically an inbox - but I want it to show up on my laptop called Outbox.). Whenever I'm using my laptop I have this folder mounted from a share on the main machine. When I come across something I might conceivably want to have access to from the main machine, I transfer it to Outbox, which is always available from my main box. It's not perfect and it's kind of annoying, but at least I'm not living in Ethiopia, dying of some kind of gross bowel disease.
 
Thanks for the tips. I'm not that keen on IMAP, so I wonder if I can point the iBook's Mail.app to the iMac's user/Library/Mail folder...

Other than that, it's easy enough to mount the iMac home folder as a share and work via the network (again, on simple stuff, not iMovie or Photoshop), I suppose.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back