Portable Home Directory

Portable Homedirectories are local homedirectories that get synchronized with a network home. To make PHD’s work you need a Mac OS X computer that is bound to a directory service (OD, LDAP, AD) and a fileserver that has the network homedir.

Configuration

To configure a Portable Home Directory you’ll need to set the account to a mobile account. You could do this in Directory Utility:

This will not make the home directory sync. The settings to make a homedir synchronized are hidden in the following preference file:

..

Logging

Logfiles can be found in the local home:

~/Library/Logs/FileSyncAgent.log

~/Library/Logs/FileSyncAgent/FileSyncAgent-verbose.log

~/Library/Logs/FileSyncUI.log

older logfiles are stored compressed next to the current log files

Binaries

The home sync binary can be found here:

/System/Library/CoreServices/ManagedClient.app/Contents/Resources/HomeSync.app/Contents/MacOS/HomeSync

Apparently it has two options:

Use “-s” to sync home now; “-r” to refresh FileSync preferences based on current com.apple.homeSync preferences.

Issues

Although PHD’s have a lot of potential, their status at Apple are unclear. There is no documentation about how they’re supposed to work.

Issues I’m seeing:

• Some Files and Folders copied by FileSyncAgent get the hidden flag set on the cifs homedir. I have a user who only sees the Library folder on the windows home. I can make the files visible by mounting the home and issueing chflag -R nohidden, but I want to know why it is hidden in the first place.
• FileSyncAgent sometimes crashes with no user notification. I’ve seen it crash on a illegal utf-8 character. This leaves the user with a half-synced home. The process never gets past the file with the illegal character in the name.
• The path to the original homedir does not get updated if the homedir attribute in AD is changed. Sometimes people’s homes have to be moved to a different server, but filesync cannot find the home anymore.