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Macrumors is normally pretty accurate, but this home page post is really inaccurate and misleading. It talks about an existing feature in Tiger as if it is a hidden unfinished feature that someone has "discovered".

No wonder posters on this thread are confused.

Arn - several people on this thread have explained what Home Sync is really about - isn't it time to update the home page story itself, and maybe relegate it to page 2? It will save a lot of confusion!
 
scotty321 said:
The ONLY problem with using iDisk for storing all of your documents is that it is limited in space -- your maximum amount of space is 1 GB. That's a huge bummer.

Umm I think you forgot to mention that fact that iDisk is *EXTREMELY* slow
 
Home folder on external drive/ipod

Jesus said:
Isidore, can you explain to all of us who don't know haw you use complicated system applications how to configure Netinfo Manager to make the system look in monted external HDDs for start-up disks instead of internal ones.

Jesus


Here is what David Pogues book says:

Mac OS x proposes putting all of the account holders' Home folders in one special folder (Users) on the main hard drive. -But being able to put somebody's Home folder-such as your own-on a different disk can have its advantages, too. If you travel back and forth between home and work, for example, you might find it convenient to keep your entire life on an iPod or some other portable disk. In corporate environments, a network administrator may want you to keep your Home folder elsewhere on the Windows network. (Yes, Mac OS X is that compatible) Sure, you can do It, but you'll have to exploit the sometimes intimidating power of Netlnfo Manager, a program, included with Mac OS X that's designed to let you perform just such technical tasks. You’ll find this program in your Applications/ Utilities folder. Open the program, click the lower-left padlock, and then enter an administrator's name and password. In the second column, click users. In the column to its right, click the name of the account whose Home folder you want to move-let's say it's chris. In the bottom half of the window, scroll down until you see an entry called home. In the next column, you’ll see its current location :/Users/chris (that is, the Home folder is called chris, and it's in the Users folder). Double-click this notation /Users/chris/ to edit it. Change this 'text to /Volumes/diskname, where diskname is the name of your removable disk (“Volumes" is the name of an invisible folder on your Mac OS x machine that lists the names of all disks present.) Press Enter, and then choose Domain~Save (and click "Update this copy" in the confirmation box)

Log out and then log back in again-as chris. You should see the house shaped icon on your desktop that the iPod is now, in effect, your Home folder, complete with all the usual home folder subfolders, (Desktop, documents library, and so on). You're not allowed to remove the disk from the Mac until you've logged out and logged back in under a different account. Once you've done so, remove the disk and take it to work (or wherever the other Mac OS x machine is). Insert the disk and then repeat all of these tasks so far. From now on both Macs will expect to find your "Home folder” on that removable disk. (Make sure that you've inserted it and given it time to spin up before you log in. And of course, don't remove the disk white you're Iogged in.) And by the way, the procedure described here will leave the original chris folder on the primary hard drive, an orphaned duplicate. It's not doing any harm, but if you find Its presence confusing, you can always delete it by restarting your Mac in Mac OS 9 (if your Mac can do that) or using sudo rm command in Terminal (if you know how to do that; see Chapter 16).

The above is a direct quote from David Pogues excellent book on Mac OS X panther edition.

If you make a mistake, as I do occasionally and do the connecting or disconnecting in the wrong order, the Mac will create a dummy user account with none of your files. DON’T PANIC! You have not lost anything. Change the name of your external hard drive where your home folder is and then use net info manager to change the location of your home folder as the instructions above tell you to do. Log out and log in again and you will again see all your files. Find the volumes folder (remember it’s invisible so your best way is to use the go to folders command in the finder, instructing the finder to go to /Volumes/ and delete the obviously orphaned alias to the non existant volume. You can then change your home drive’s name back if you want to (doing all the net info rigmarole again) and everything is back to normal. It sounds much more complicated than it is. One last thing. At the risk of stating the obvious, you will have to transfers the files you want to carry about into the new home folder! What I do is to use a synchronisation package like say You Synchronise to keep the folder on the machine synced with the portable drive- then the folder on the machine acts as a backup.

Hope this helps!
 
I opened "HomeSync.menu" and now the little house logo is permanently in the upper right even after a restart.

Any ideas on how to get rid of it?
 
Built-in to NeXTSTEP/Openstep

Before they split the operating system into a Workstation and Server edition, these "features" were built-in.

Any NeXTSTEP system could be a Master NetInfo Server, a Clone Server and what not.

The improvements are many with how they resolve across different subnets, but let me just say something:

This is how we all worked at NeXT. All our employee accounts were on a set of servers and every machine running either NS 3.3 or Openstep up to 4.2 obviously, were available for us at our leisure, freeing one to go from one system to the next and do some work not leaving one fixed to our local client user account.

What I want to see back is a Workspace Manager that has a Finder with a resizable shelf, and if I am in a very large network I can quickly browse to another employee home directory be Shift-tilde-username and check out their public folders, or if I'm in a large development structure do the same damn thing, but on project folders or what have you.

I would hope at the very least, corporations running OS X share all applications under one /LocalApps folder that is accessible by all clients instead of installing countless copies of applications on all client systems.
 
Foocha said:
One interesting point to note is that your Library folder (and as such your Preferences) can't be synced (when selecting folders to sync it is not there).
I just wanted to stress this point.
Foocha is right. I opened a service request at apple support and they confirmed it.
This means, that you cannot sync mails, bookmarks and all the other important stuff.
Hence the marketing picture having a portable user is a a plain lie. You still need other tools to solve this problem.
Any normal synctool is cheaper than OS X Server.
Actually I don't know, why I need OS X Server now as it is not possible for non-admins to switch from network to mobile mode on a portable computer either.
Hence on portable computers in mobile mode the Server is just a file server and you still have your two mailboxes.
No big picture having a Windows Server Domain simular concept here


There is only hope, that future Tiger updates will solve this as there are other service requests for this feature.

The worst is, that this feature was announced in former press releases of Tiger in June 2004.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/28tigerserver.html

But in any current documentations, the word preferences or /Library is not mentioned anymore - not even in a "not included"-way.
 
Homesync may not be Tiger Server option at all

We are testing Tiger in a corporate environment with no Tiger Server, and no Mac OSX servers other than one X-Serve running Font Reserve Server. We have an Active Directory system in place on a .local net, and use the Apple Directory Access util to configure systems for mobile accounts for AD accounts.

We get the HomeSync menu appearing in the top menubar after creating mobile accounts (which we do for all macs, desktops as well as PowerBooks).

Since the functionality isn't available on our network (or at least we are not interested in implementing it), how can we remove the HomeSync menu from the accounts automatically created under AD when someone logs in under the "Other" option?

I've tried removing it from the local Admin account, but it still appears in the newly-created non-Admin AD user's accounts. Can I pull the HomeSync.menu file from the System->Library->CoreServices->Menu Extras directory?
 
Tiger portable homesync for AD user "workaround"

I hope this document will be helpful for all those who are having problems bind tiger to AD to utilize get portable homesync feature.

1st off, I want to note that apple support / care / software specialist are absolutely useless. They have no logic or knowledge for even the simplest networking related issue, domain / workgroup printing or cross platform support. Wow, only 1 out of 10 representatives from the 800 support actually took his time listen and try to help. (Thanks Ross) The rest of them would brush me off to the advanced networking software engineer dept which cost around $700+ per incident. “Horrible nightmare services and supports” LOL, well anyways, lets carrying on.

Since apple acknowledged that mobile account with home directory enabled is a bug and from reading everyone’s posts. I was able to found a workaround to this. BTW/FYI – portable homesync work for both Tiger client and server. Here are the steps for tricking the system. Good luck and have fun 

Assuming you have rights to a AD domain with proper share(permission) setup for home directory and know your ways around mac directory access/netinfo manager etc..
• “MAC” Bind Tiger to AD using Directory Access – be sure to put a checkbox for “create mobile account at login” and leave everything else default.
• “MAC” Under account pref -> Login options – uncheck “automatically login as” and select “list of users”
• “MAC” log out - “other….” Should appear as one of the login options
• “Win AD” Create a new AD user – be sure the profile tab is left blank (don’t worry, we will be back to update this/those field(s))
• “MAC” clicks on other and sign on with the newly created ad user account – you should get prompted to create a mobile profile – click yes
• “MAC” once signed on. Log out. – The new user should now be listed on the sign on screen with “mobile” labeled right under the name
• “MAC” signed back in as the local admin account
• “MAC” open Utilities -> Directory Access -> Active Directory – uncheck “create mobile account at login, save, and log out”
• “Win AD” edit the above AD user and select profile tab – type in your home share path and click ok. Wait like 20 mins for the AD info to sync up
• “MAC” log back in with the user account, your home folder should be mounted on your desktop. (If your home folder is not mounting on your desktop after you waited a while, read the below instructions to manually mounted the folder using netinfo manager, I prefer manually mounting it because it’s faster)
• “MAC” goto system pref -> account pref, you should now have the option to click the configure button to setup portable home sync. (Remember to set it to manual sync, automatically doesn’t seem to work properly. 4 faster and better performance, I only select and sync the document folder)


To manually force mount home directory
Launch netinfo manage -> select user -> select the mobile user account, add the following.
Smb_home = \\sun\rfs$\username
Smb_home_drive = o:
Original_home_loc =
<home_dir><url>smb://servername.domain.com/share</url><path>username</path></home_dir>
 
quick fix

JohnGillilan said:
I opened "HomeSync.menu" and now the little house logo is permanently in the upper right even after a restart.

Any ideas on how to get rid of it?

Hold down the apple key while dragging the icon off the menubar. The
same action also allows you to re-arrange icons on the menu bar... I too learned this today...
:eek:
 
Forcing Portable Homes to Sync ~/Library

Forcing Portable Homes to Sync ~/Library
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20050601101436323

With a little hacking this can be done. Don't forget in Workgroup Manager in MCX you can choose to exclude folders from the sync - like Safari's cache or the ~/Library/Caches folder.

Wednesday, June 01 2005 @ 12:30 PM CDT
Contributed by: macshome
Views: 2292
So. You've got your new 10.4 server setup and you are planning on using synced Portable Homes to backup your user's files. That's great as long as you don't care about ~/Library, which Apple has hard excluded from home syncing.

Like most things in life though, when there is a will there is a way.

Read on for the details...


Not only has Apple made it hard to sync ~/Library, they have added some nice touches to drive the point home. For example, if you try to add ~/Library to the sync list in WGM it will just vanish before your eyes. One time when I tried it, I could of sworn I heard my server laughing quietly at me...

Why bother syncing the user's Library? For most people it can be summed up in one word, Mail. Apple's Mail application uses ~/Library to store it's mail, and what is more valuable to backup than your e-mail? Not much on my Mac.

You would think it would be enough to remove ~/Library from the exclude rules on your server, but it's not. There are two more plists waiting to potentially foil you.

The user's own ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.homeSync.plist file will trip you up. You can either edit the file, removing all keys that contain ~/Library, or just tell your mcx settings to override the user's sync settings. If you are managing all of this from a server I would just un-check the "Merge with user's settings" box and override them.

There is another plist waiting to get you, /System/Library/CoreServices/mcxd/Contents/Resources/CinchDefaults.plist and this one is the key. This file sets the defaults for the whole system. Make a backup, then remove all of the ~/Library keys from this plist. Now login as a user with a Portable Home and you should see ~/Library sync.

Now there are a lot of good reasons not to sync the contents of ~/Library, but if you are careful you can work your way around the pitfalls. I would add the ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost, and ~/Library/Preferences/Mirrors directories as a minimum to your exclude rules.

I normally tell you here to have fun and read the man pages, but since there are no man pages in this case you can just concentrate on having fun.
 
Silly question, but. How do remove the icon now its been put there on my task bar thing?

Sorry, but i'm new to this mac malarky....
 
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