[kennedy]

When a user sets up links in his/her Dock, it uses the physical path, not the path accessed. So, if you have a set of apps in /Shared/Applications on your server that you mount in /Network/Applications on your clients, then you can't put those apps in your Dock and have them work on both Server and Client.

If you log into a client computer and drag the app to your Dock, you get a path like /private/automount/Network/Applications/fubar ... and that will not exist on the server. If you do the same from the server computer, you get /Shared/Applications/fubar, and that won't work on the Client.

One solution would be to get Applications to mount on the Server just like it does on the Client. That seems like the way it should be anyway. No reason a Server can't Serve itself.

Another solution would be to get the Dock links saved using relative addresses, rather than the underlying physical address.

Any ideas?

[krove]

Have you tried editting the Dock preferences file to the new paths (replacing the non-working ones)?

I guess this will only work if you don't change your Dock that often. Then again, you could just make an alias for easy access to make Dock changes or place it in the Dock!

[kennedy]

Originally posted by krove:
Have you tried editting the Dock preferences file to the new paths (replacing the non-working ones)?

I guess this will only work if you don't change your Dock that often. Then again, you could just make an alias for easy access to make Dock changes or place it in the Dock!

Thanks. I thought about both those options... but since I'm setting this up as a network for many people, I wanted something a bit simpler on their side.

I was focusing on static mounts so that I could set up consistent links to make the Dock work and to make it easy to find the apps in the finder. Interestingly, after more experimentation, I think its actually easier with dynamic mounts...

With a dynamic mount, although the placement is horribly inconsistent, OS X auto-magically substitutes the first part of the paths! So, for example, the Dock links just work... even though they are linking to dramatically different spots. I even moved the Apps directory to a new spot, changed how it was shared, rebooted... and automagically the Dock links adjusted. Bizarre.

That just left the issue of finding the Apps in the finder. For that, I decided to simply set up a symbolic link from /Applications/Additions to the extra apps directory, wherever that is on each machine.

So, I didn't solve the issue I posed... but rather worked around it to solve the underlying issues.

Thanks!