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2 Macs, One User account QUESTION

Punkwaffle

Punkwaffle

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 12, 2004
205
6
Does anyone know if it is possible for the following scenario to work:

I have an iMac and an iBook. Both have airport cards and I have an airport base station. My user account that I always use is on my imac. Can I log into that user account on my ibook using airport? I don't want a vnc solution, I actually want to use the ibook cpu and the data on the imac.
Any solutions or workarounds?

thanks.
 
to be the user on the ibook. the files should remain on the imac.
 
I think I know what you want, because my situation is similar. The below steps may not be the best solution, but it has worked for me.

1) On you iMac, export your user account directory (i.e. /Users/<username>) using NFS. Then mount that directory on your iBook using NFS also. You may want to use the shareware util NFS Manager for this purpose. Samba does not work, because samba does not respect Unix user permission as well as NFS.

2) Create a new user account on the iBook, then use NetInfo Manager to point the home directory of this new iBook user to the mounted NFS directory location. Since it's a network mounted directory, it's location should be something like this: /automount/Servers/<IP address>/Users/<username>. Also, you need to ensure that the UID of the new iBook user match that of the iMac user. I believe you can use NetInfo Manager to do this too.

That's it. When you next login into the new user account on the iBook, you should see exactly the files and desktop of the iMac user. Since Mac OS X has an automounter, you should not need to manually perform the mount on the iBook anymore; just login will do.

There is one catch: you should not have both the iMac account and iBook account logged in at the same time, because they'll be accessing the same files, and file corruption may result. So you should logout of the iMac account first before you login to the iBook account.

Good luck.
 
ok, just got my ibook home and i'm trying to follow these instructions. i have very little knowledge of networking so if someone can spell this out for me step by step or point me to a site that already has it, I would appreciate it.

Thanks.
 
Not using airport very easily, but you could connect the two with a firewire cable and boot the iBook up from the iMac's HD by holding down T on the iMac on startup (iMac HD appears on iBook's desktop) and then select the iMac's HD as the start up disk.
 
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