Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ Server For Dummies®

Chapter 17. Creating Mobile Accounts for Notebooks

In This Chapter

• Firing up Workgroup Manager

• Exploring mobile account options for networked notebooks

• Configuring mobility settings

• Deploying mobile home folders

• Synching mobile clients

You've had enough sitting at your desk and it's time to get out of the office, but how do you take your data with you when you go home? What if you need to make a presentation at a client's office out of town? Do you drag your entire network infrastructure with you? Imagine the airline luggage fees.

In this chapter, you determine the best method for managing client computers that aren't tied down — most frequently these are notebook computers. Instead of having user home folders stored only on a server volume or only on the client computer, mobility settings offer a combination of these two choices. Snow Leopard Server lets you create mobile home folders for Mac, Windows, and Linux clients.

With mobile accounts, domain information such as mobile preferences and user account data, as well as user data, are all updated when the user connects to the network. Mobile accounts can also have a portable home folder synchronized between a server volume and the internal hard drive. I examine the options in this chapter, and you see how to create a mobile account and a portable home folder.

Later in this chapter, I describe how to create and manage mobile accounts and home folder synchronization in Workgroup Manager.

Connecting Workgroup Manager to a Shared Domain

As with ...