Topic: MAC home network question

[patrick]

I am wanting to set up a home network for the MACs in my house using SME. My question is, can I do it so that all users can go to any work station and log in and they will have their desktop available? I guess this is called roaming profiles. Any help or suggestions for where to look for this info?

[mmccarn]

macs have something similar to roaming profiles that they call 'mobile accounts'.

On my Windows 2003 Active Directory, the steps for workstation setup exactly match the steps shown in the video starting about 1:15 (the narrator is talking about a network user named 'Boynton'):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHDvG396KE0#t=01m015s

I didn't have to do anything extra in AD to enable mobile accounts (so the beginning of the video up to 1:16 shouldn't apply to you).

The problem we have on our network is that the entire 'mobile account' profile is copied back and forth to the server at each logon/logoff - so for users with large collections of files in their home folder, logging in to a new workstation on a wireless network can be quite time consuming.

[patrick]

Thanks for the link - however, this seems to be for MACs using MAC Server rather than SME. You don't need mac server as well as SME do you?

[mmccarn]

The video describes mac workstations connecting to a mac server -- but the workstation part in the video (starting at 1:15) is exactly the same as the process we use on our active directory to setup mobile accounts.

Before this will work you will need to 'join' the mac workstations to your SME domain.

and... I've never done this on a SME server, so I don't know that you'll get the 'mobile account' option on your macs after joining them to your SME domain.