Mobile Accounts: Cont.

As we’ve begun to setup our MacBooks with mobile accounts we have run into a few fairly severe problems. The first, and most difficult problem has been the Mobile Accounts selectively choosing which rules to follow when first building their user accounts.

When you are setting up Mobile Accounts you use the Workgroup Manager tool to set rules for the syncing process. These allow you to specify which files on a users computer are synced and at what intervals. This way you can tell the server to Sync all of the users important documents, while ignoring iTunes Libraries or iMovie files that would eat gigs of server space. When first enabling mobile accounts Apple does a pretty good job with the default rules knowing not to back up such files as the Library Cache but by default it syncs user/~ which would be every file within the users home. In addition to adding movies, pictures, and music to the do not sync list we removed to user/~ which would effectively only sync the documents folder. We even went into the documents folder and put the Microsoft User Data into the do not sync folder. The idea was to be extra careful so that the syncing would not overwhelm our very limited bandwidth.

What we did not take into account was that in order to build an accurate replica of the users home directory on the computer we needed all of that extraneous information such as preferences and mailboxes that were stored in the Library file. When logging into the users accounts for testing and confirmation of a successful sync we realized that none of the Mail clients were properly setup and that no bookmarks or old email was transfered. Initially, we thought we could solve this problem simply by adding the directories to the sync list in workgroup manager and forcing a resync where the network would override the client settings. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a way to do this. Upon every subsequent log on the settings were not merged or override and instead were simply ignored by the syncing process.

The only solution that we have been able to find is to complete delete the mobile account created on the users notebook, and then rebuild the home directory from scratch. A very long and tedious process, but at least it solves the problem.
The second problem we came across we still don’t have any solution for. In order for a user to switch from Mobile to Networked accounts or visa versa they are forced to do a complete shutdown or reset of the machine. In other words if a user logs out of their network account at work, then take the notebook home they cannot log into the mobile accounts without first shutting down the computer. Its interesting to note that they can convert from/to a mobile account if they are logged into the computer when the change occurs, e.g., plugging into the network after originally logging into the computer while offline. We’ve made a little process into this problem, it used to require a restart between every logout/login even network to network but that problem seemed to solve itself giving us no clues as to the cause or solution.