[Alex Duffield]

I have been trying to set up a netinfo parent/child setup where the child’s home directories are in /Network/Users/

That would seem the obvious place for users on the network to be, No?

Well, it cant be done. (At least that is what the folk at Apple tech told me) It seems that you cant set the users home directories to be "Statically Mounted" at /Network/Users/. Home directories have to be mounted "Dynamically" at /Network/Servers/...

And from there it gets worse... I have my network users home directories on a second 80 gig drive in my server. The drive is called "80giger" in there I created the default home for network users, I called it "NetworkUsers"

So now I got network users successfully logging on to the netinfo Parent server, and there home directory comes up in...

/Network/Servers/ServerName/Volumes/80giger/NetworkUsers/username

Hmmm...Doesn’t

/Network/Users/usename

Seem just a "little" more elegant??

Not to mention that even after more than 6 hours of being on the phone to Apples OSX Server Tech support people (3 different people) over a 2 day period, I was sill unable to get ANYTHING to get mounted Statically at

/Network/Users/
/Network/Applications/
/Network/Library/

It is bad enough that the documentation for OSX Server is as bad as it is, but there Tech support people seem to be trying to set up these systems for the first time themselves.. and reading from the same pdf I have…

If any one has ever successfully set this up, could you PLEASE post or point me to a good howto???

[kennedy]

I had my network users mounted in /Network/Users in 10.0.4.
Worked beautifully.

I did the same thing in 10.1, and there is indeed mounts at /Network/Users and /Network/Applications, but if you click on the HOME button in 10.1 Finder it takes you to:

/HD/private/automount/Network/Users/user

which is clearly silly/buggy.

But users *can* get to their accounts at /Network/Users/user.
And it is statically mounted.

Caveat: I have this setup in plain OS X 10.1.x on my Mac network at home. I am just now starting to install OS X Server on my larger network at my business... and I will figure out how to make this work and what's different in the next day or two.


Brian

[Gee4orce]

Erm - 'man ln' and make a symbolic link...

My /Users folder is symlinked to a totally different drive, and I see no reason why you can't do the same in /Network/Users

[kennedy]

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
<STRONG>Erm - 'man ln' and make a symbolic link...

My /Users folder is symlinked to a totally different drive, and I see no reason why you can't do the same in /Network/Users</STRONG>

That'll work, but when you hit HOME button you'll still end up off somewhere funny.

What's strange is that in 'netinfo' I explicitly specify each user's home directory to be in /Network/Users/user. And in 10.0.4 that's what you got. In 10.1 they changed it to where it auto adds as a prefix where it automounts such things... which I guess they thought was a clever thing to do... I find it quite annoying. I sure hope they restore it back to the way it was in 10.0.4.

Perhaps there is a 'netinfo' option to tell it not to do that... to use the directory as written????
Anyone know how to find a complete list of the options (properties and values) for each thing in netinfo??

Thanks,

Brian

[Alex Duffield]

I tryed the ln but was unable...

ln -s /Network/Users /Network/Servers/marvin/Volumes/80giger/NetworkUsers/

it came back with...


ln: /Network/Servers/marvin/Volumes/80giger/NetworkUsers//Users: Permission denied


This was done as the Root user on the child system.

Still, even if I could get it to work, I would have to do that on EVERY client.. That is not realy a solution. It should work the way Apple says.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by Alex Duffield:
<STRONG>I tryed the ln but was unable...

ln -s /Network/Users /Network/Servers/marvin/Volumes/80giger/NetworkUsers/

it came back with...


ln: /Network/Servers/marvin/Volumes/80giger/NetworkUsers//Users: Permission denied
</STRONG>

You got your args reversed there.

But you can specify a static mount right over /Network/Users, making it unnecessary to worry about symbolic linking. In the local netinfo on the server you add the Users directory to 'exports' and in the shared netinfo on the server (which the other computers point to as their parent) specifies the server and directory in 'mounts' and specify that you want it mounted on the '/Network/Users'. As I noted earlier, you will still get an ugly automount location... that's normal... but pressing the HOME button will unfortunately take you there instead of to the prettier /Network/Users.


Brian