Chapter 17

Creating Mobile Accounts for Notebooks

In This Chapter

  • Firing up Workgroup Manager
  • Exploring mobile account options for networked notebooks
  • Configuring mobility settings
  • Creating server-based home folders and 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. Lion Server lets you create mobile home folders for Mac, Windows, and Linux clients. (This is in addition to all the mobile configuration features of Profile Manager, which I describe in Chapter 16.)

With mobile accounts, domain information such as mobile preferences and user account data, as well as user data, is 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 server-based home folder, which you then turn ...

Get Mac OS X Lion Server For Dummies® now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.