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RE:Home directories

Surajit,

Here is our setup:

We have about 300 G4 towers and 2 xserves. One xserve is open directory master for doing MCX settings and the other is a replica incase the OD master fails. The replica is also our ghosting server and holds IT Stuff. All the clients and Xserves will be 10.3.3 machines unless an update comes out before July then we will most likely update to that version.

I have testing machines thru out the building because we haven't moved to OS X fully just yet, I still don't think OS X is ready to move too but I guess we pretty much have too.

After ghosting a machine using Netinstall and Mike Bombich Netrestore the machines reboot and name themselves with the script I got off of macosxlabs.org from Iowa University, Great time saver!! I wish I could do the same with binding to AD!

Anyway after the machine starts and renames itself I login as and admin and run a script on the desktop to BIND to AD and replace the Kerberos file with our custom one and thats it everything is setup and ready to go.

For Home Directories:

When a user logs in they get a temp home directory, I also got this script from macosxlabs.org, I think I am using the one Mike Bombich wrote. When a user logs out there folder gets moved to /Library/SavedHomeTemp folder and is time stamped with the time and date and username. Then everynight a little before 11pm the SavedHomeTemp folder gets deleted and recreated. Then 11pm comes and the computers shutdown for the night, well they are supposed to but are not working for some reason??

I haven't had any complaints yet about this setup but I am sure it will be a pain for some until we are able to use Home Directories off of a server. Also I should mention is on the clients in the OS X template in /System/Library/UserTemplate I have custom prefs in that template so people don't get register ads etc. when starting a program. The biggest complaint I plan to hear from teachers are saving favorites in the webbrowser and OS X defaulting saves to the usershome directory when they need to save to there personal share on the server.

Answer to your Questions:

1. Since applications by default save documents in the home
directory, users could potentially work on a paper for hours, think
it's saved, log out....and lose the document.

REPLY: This is why I have the Home Directory get moved to a temp folder with the users name and time/date stamp so its recoverable. If they come the next day and tell us about it oh well its too late they should have told us first thing. But you could always customize this setup to your likings!

2. The current setup allows users to set their own desktop
background, download applications and run them from their home
directories, preserve application preferences/fonts, etc. All this
would go away.

REPLY: This is most likely going to be the main problem for us also. The Home folder gets refreshed on login so settings they make won't be saved they will get refreshed settings apon every login. I guess you could let the Home Directories there in /Users but I think that would end up being a huge mess, people having to be on the same computer, etc.. I like this setup because people get refreshed working prefs at login and should do away with problems of corrupt plist files etc..

If you have any questions let me know, I will try to answer them the best I can!

Thanks,


Dan Ball
Pittsburgh Technical Institute

--__--__--

Message: 5
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 16:50:29 -0700
To: email@hidden
From: Surajit A Bose <email@hidden>
Subject: Home directories

Hello gang.

I have a few questions regarding home directories. Stanford currently
gives each user a 100MB AFS mounted network space. Our LDAP servers
are set up such that when a user logs into a lab Mac, this space is
used as the home directory. We've encountered a few problems in this
setup.

For example, if a user is close to full on their disk quota, login
hangs, or if it completes, the user experiences random application
crashes. Also, ~/Library/Preferences randomly gets corrupted for some
users, showing up as a file instead of a directory and causing much
consternation. Finally, we're on 10.2.8 right now, but in our
development of a Panther image for the fall, we've discovered that
opening a file in AFS space, modifying it, and trying to save it
results in a kernel panic on occasion: invariably when using
SubEthaEdit, randomly when using Microsoft Word. (Our AFS folks tell
me that this is due to some weird interaction between the Panther
Finder and OpenAFS, but that isn't too helpful when it comes to
resolving the issue.)

All this is causing us to rethink our current model. We're
considering creating local home directories on the fly and erasing
them on logout. This raises some questions for us:

1. Since applications by default save documents in the home
directory, users could potentially work on a paper for hours, think
it's saved, log out....and lose the document.

2. The current setup allows users to set their own desktop
background, download applications and run them from their home
directories, preserve application preferences/fonts, etc. All this
would go away.

My questions: how do folks that create local home directories on the
fly handle these issues? Have there been other problems with this
setup for which I should be on the lookout?

I'd also like to hear from folks who are using network home dirs.
Right now the only other place I know that does the same thing as
Stanford is Notre Dame, and I'm trying to get in touch with the folks
there. But if you are using network home dirs, I'd be grateful to
hear about your experiences.

If you'd like to e-mail me directly, I will summarize and post to the list.

Thanks,
-s
--

"Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eggs."

Surajit A. Bose
Cluster Operations Manager
Stanford University
650.725.2939
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