[austinjackson]

From http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mobility/

"Home on the Network
If you regularly work on a network at the office or school, you can keep your home folder synchronized between your Mac and the network. Work offline all you want, then next time you connect to the network and log in, the files you added or changed will automatically synchronize with the matching network-based home folder. And the process works the other way too: Any new files on your network home folder are automatically copied to the home folder on your computer."

That is exciting... I wonder if it will require .Mac?

[xi_hyperon]

I wouldn't think it would require .mac, but don't hold me to it.

OT, your thread title made me think of this:

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by xi_hyperon:
I wouldn't think it would require .mac, but don't hold me to it.

OT, your thread title made me think of this:

Interestingly enough, I think the technology is called DoubleWide™.

[Millennium]

I'd guess that this will probably require .mac, but I hope I'm wrong.

[austinjackson]

Originally posted by Millennium:
I'd guess that this will probably require .mac, but I hope I'm wrong.

It isn't listed under the .Mac section of the page. I hope it works with any WebDAV. I have some server space that would be perfect for this.

[Big Mac]

Since the print specifies office or school as the location for the "network" home folder, it sounds like this probably will be a feature provided by OS X Server.

[larkost]

This is all about DirectoryServices and MacOS X Server. We are talking about Network Home Folders. Currently in order to use them you have to be connected (with a high speed connection) to the server all the time. The rumor during 10.4 development was that they would allow for "mobile home directories" so you could sync up to the server, then take your PowerBook off into the wild while still using your files, and when you returned to the server it would re-sync.

In the simple case this is easy... but it quickly becomes a small nightmare when you can log into the same folder from multiple places.

Now, the real questions are: how well does it work (and deal with the conflicting cases), and does it only work in conjunction with MacOS X Server (10.4) or can it also work with ActiveDirectory?

[Superchicken]

Holy CRAP! This almost solves the question I was asking before... now if only I could set up OS X server for a decent price haha... and no I won't pirate.

[austinjackson]

Originally posted by larkost:
This is all about DirectoryServices and MacOS X Server.

Shucks. I wonder if there is an open-source alternative to doing something like this with WebDAV or something similar. I don't have access to a MacOS X Server environment. It would be nice to not have to run a sync manually or at login.

[CatOne]

Originally posted by austinjackson:
Shucks. I wonder if there is an open-source alternative to doing something like this with WebDAV or something similar. I don't have access to a MacOS X Server environment. It would be nice to not have to run a sync manually or at login.

How about using your iDisk?

Select "keep a local copy of your iDisk" and you have things synchronized between your machine and .Mac, and you can use it to keep multiple machines in sync. What am I missing?

If you want to have some other folder that synchs this way via .Mac, just use something like ChronoSync to do the dirty work, but the iDisk is the way forward. You can even symlink your /Users/austin/Documents folder to a folder on your iDisk, if you want to get uber-crazy.

[passmaster16]

Originally posted by larkost:
This is all about DirectoryServices and MacOS X Server. We are talking about Network Home Folders. Currently in order to use them you have to be connected (with a high speed connection) to the server all the time. The rumor during 10.4 development was that they would allow for "mobile home directories" so you could sync up to the server, then take your PowerBook off into the wild while still using your files, and when you returned to the server it would re-sync.

In the simple case this is easy... but it quickly becomes a small nightmare when you can log into the same folder from multiple places.

Now, the real questions are: how well does it work (and deal with the conflicting cases), and does it only work in conjunction with MacOS X Server (10.4) or can it also work with ActiveDirectory?

Isn't this pretty much the same concept as roaming profiles in Windows?

[larkost]

Originally posted by passmaster16:
Isn't this pretty much the same concept as roaming profiles in Windows?

In a word: yes.

...hense my question about ActiveDirectory (one that probably won't see an answer on this list).

[passmaster16]

Originally posted by larkost:
In a word: yes.

...hense my question about ActiveDirectory (one that probably won't see an answer on this list).

Yeah that would be nice if it worked with AD. My guess would be no as Microsoft probably uses some proprietary mechanisim for that.

I'm not sure if I'm a fan of roaming profiles or not....the concept is good but in the case of it on windows/AD, we had users saving gb of data to their desktop and My Documents folders and since our domain controller was offsite, it was painful when having to log in and pulling that data across the WAN.

[austinjackson]

Originally posted by CatOne:
How about using your iDisk?

I am not a .Mac user. I already pay for a ton of server space for other uses, have more e-mail addresses than I can handle, don't need virus software, and would unlikely use the other features of .Mac.

Is it possible to extend iSync in this way with the new version? Maybe time to do some developing.

[MacMan4000]

I bet this is possible in Panther. With some tinkering...

I currently have my entire home folder and user account on a firewire drive. the /users folder on my mac only has "shared" in it.

I bet this could be set up to tell OS X that your home folder in on a server somewhere... but it couldn't be password protected I don't think.

I really have no idea... I'm just going on my own experience with the firewire drive.