[DeepDish]

We have several macs in our office running OS X 10.2+

We are thinking about getting OS X Server.

Can I set it up so that everybody's user folder is stored on the server and runs off the server instead of thier local machine?

That way users can have all of thier preferences, desktop and documents no matter which machine they are using.

The system might run slower because of the read/write over ethernet, but it would be cool to log into another mac in a different room in the office and have access to your own desktop and documents.

Is this possible or am I just living in Star Trek world?

[kampl]

Apple KB . Netinfo will do what you want.

[anthology123]

assuming you know how to setup an osx server, yes netinfo, but more important, you should setup a domain, so your Macs will log into the server instead of going for the login directory on the local machine.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by DeepDish:
Can I set it up so that everybody's user folder is stored on the server and runs off the server instead of thier local machine?

That way users can have all of thier preferences, desktop and documents no matter which machine they are using.

Just to substantiate those other answers...

Yes you can do this... and OS X Server 10.2 makes this easy. You need not even realize NetInfo is involved... the server admin tools handle everything.

I have my business setup this way. Each office and a few public-use areas have iMacs. There's a PowerMac dual 800 in my little computer office that houses everybody's user accounts, plus a lot of the third-party applications.

You can walk up to any iMac in the building and login and the world is exactly the same... only difference being whether that particular iMac has a CD burner or just a player.

The system might run slower because of the read/write over ethernet, but it would be cool to log into another mac in a different room in the office and have access to your own desktop and documents.

Speed has not been an issue. However, I should say that I did install a switch with a gigabit server port to connect to my PowerMac. In that way, up to 10 iMacs could theoretically be hitting the server simultaneously at full 100Mb speeds.

I have about 15 iMacs running against the one server, and often have people logged in and working on over a dozen of those at a time.

However, with all that said, as little forum traffic as there seems to be on OS X Server, I often wonder whether I am the only one on the planet actually using it this way.

Is this possible or am I just living in Star Trek world?

Star Trek? Heck, we were doing this with NFS in the 80's. In fact, that setup was even cooler in some ways... we could each have our home directory on our own machine for normal speed... but if we logged into another, it just used our normal machine as a server. So, you got the same feel on any machine, but it was as fast as possible when you were on your normal machine. Also minimized demand on the network. Of course, that was more important back then, since things were only 10Mb.

HTH.

[CatOne]

Originally posted by DeepDish:
We have several macs in our office running OS X 10.2+

We are thinking about getting OS X Server.

Can I set it up so that everybody's user folder is stored on the server and runs off the server instead of thier local machine?

That way users can have all of thier preferences, desktop and documents no matter which machine they are using.

The system might run slower because of the read/write over ethernet, but it would be cool to log into another mac in a different room in the office and have access to your own desktop and documents.

Is this possible or am I just living in Star Trek world?

Just as an FYI, if you do this on Panther (10.3) server you'd be better off using Open Directory, rather than NetInfo. NetInfo is being replaced by Open Directory, going forward.