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Using Networked Home Directories with Mac OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the there's-no-place-like-$HOME dept.

trouser asks: "I work in a small office using Macs running Mac OS X and PCs running Linux (Debian). There's no problem sharing files between the machines using Samba, Netatalk, and FTP. However, we want to set the Macs up so that at login they mount home directories from one of the Linux boxes so that we get the same home directory no matter which machine we login on. I've read a little about doing this using NetInfo but I gather with LDAP being included with Jaguar that there might be other options now. Any clues?"

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of stuff depends on HFS+ by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On 10.1, I hacked NetInfo to keep my home directory on a linux NFS share. Lots of stuff broke. Lots of stuff, even good stuff like Mozilla, doesn't work because the filesystem isn't transparent to Carbon on non-HFS+ volumes. Even local UFS doesn't work.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  2. Slightly OT for those having automount issues by alyandon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For those that were using the following format for fstab: /dev/disk### /Applications hfs rw 1 2

    You may have noticed that automount refuses to mount partitions on your /Application and /Users mount points under Jaguar like it did for before. The correct format for your fstab entries should be:

    LABEL=(partition name as mounted under /Volumes) /Users|/Applications|/Whatever hfs rw 1 2

    Instead of spaces between the items use tabs -- I haven't verified if spaces work yet.

    I'm not a mac user myself but my roommate struggled with this issue for quite a few hours before hitting on the solution. I figured I'd pass it along in case anyone else was struggling with it.

  3. Tunneling Samba over SSH from OS X by Noonian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since I maintain my own machine, I get put on the semi-trusted network, which means that I can't directly mount my smb share. On my Linux box, I work around this by tunneling SMB through an ssh tunnel, but on my OS X machine, I can't find a way to override the SMB port to the tunneled port (sure, I could use smbclient, but that's just not lickable). I've tried a few variations on the URL from the Finder's cmd-k dialog:

    smb://username@localhost:tunnelport/share?WORKGR OU P=wkgp

    smb://username@localhost/share?WORKGROUP=wkgrp;P OR T=tunnelport

    and many variants, but not seems to work. Any suggestions? Has anyone figured out how to override the SMB port?