Mac file sharing (i.e. psuedo file server)...

[kk05629]

Greetings...I am trying to accomplish something with my 2 macs that I just can;t seem to get my hands around. I want to take advantage of having the 4 users in my household have their home folders in a shared drive. Then they can have the same desktop, etc available from either Mac they log into.

I guess I am trying to set up a poor man's file server (I really don;t want to dump $999 for the MacMini server).

I tried setting up my Airport Extreme with a USB drive, changing a "test" user's home folder location to the USB drive on the AE (after using ditto -V to copy the user's home file to the AE usb drive). When I attempt to login...the mac cannot find the drive. I have tried the various suggestions he on MacRumors to keep the AE usb drive available during login no avail.

So...my questions are:

1). Can anyone think of another technique I can use to automount the AE USB drive so that it is available for the user logging in to access their Home folder on the AE USB drive?

or

2). Can I connect the USB drive to my iMac and have that drive be available all the time? I suppose so...but I would think I would need to disable putting the iMac to sleep in order to maintain the mount to the usb drive attached to the iMac?

Any suggestions are appreciated and welcome.

 

[BlueRevolution]

I haven't tried it myself, but you might be able to set up NetBoot on the drive. I'm on my iPod so I can't easily look up supporting documentation, but I'm sure you can find info online.