[bojangles]

Forgive me if this is a stupid question; I�ve never networked multiple Mac OS X machines before.

For almost six years, my wife and I have been using our beloved beige G3/266. It�s a bit slow by today�s standards, but it runs Jag 10.2.8 quite smoothly, considering.

Yesterday, I purchased a very gently used dual-2GHz G5 (including Panther and a whole bunch of software) from my former employer! Needless to say, we are extremely excited about this, but it brings up an interesting issue: we would like either of us to be able to log into either machine at any given time and everything to be there. Is there a way to synchronize the accounts across the network so that if, for example, I add something to my desktop on one computer it will show up when I log into the other? (I know M$ Windows networks can do this; I�d really hate to think Mac OS X can�t.)

What I�d really like to do (if this is possible; it probably isn�t) is store the user accounts on the G5 and have the G3 access them from there. The G3, after all, is using about 7.65GB of its 7.99GB system partition and sometimes gets bogged down; moving all our prefs, mail, etc. off of that partition would probably be quite beneficial.

Thanks in advance!

[si_lance]

Ok I think this can be done, but it will require some redundant steps since you lack something like NIS (centralized administration). You should be able to NFS mount the G5's /Users dir onto the G3 and make a user with it's home dir on the mounted dir. Of course I think you'll have to setup a user on the G5 and create the same user on the G3 (the redundant step). The G5 will have to be "on" for the G3 to work like this.


(On the G3)
I do see one problem though. I come from a Linux background so when I create a user I simply issue:
useradd -d /path/to/users/home/folder username

In OS X, however, you create the user account in System Preferences (there are more complicated ways like using nicl) then you have to delete the user's home and create it on the mounted dir like this (as root):
nicl / -delete /users/username home
nicl / -create /users/username home /path/to/NFS/mounted/Users/username

good luck.

p.s. in the Windows world you were talking about this functionality known as roaming profiles, but even that requires a central server in a domain scenario.
p.s.s. I reread this and noticed that you run 10.2.8 on the G3 and prolly 10.3 or 10.3.1 on the dual G5. If so, they probably have different plists (prefs) and also the shells are different by default (10.2.8 is tcsh where 10.3.x is bash). Sorry. I now recommend vnc if it supports multi-sessions like it does in Linux.