General strategy for home directories and iLife/Final Cut/Logic

[mikelj99]

Hi

Just wondered whether anybody has any real-world advice on this...we have an RM CC3 network and a new Mac Pro 10.6 Server with OD/AD integration just set up.

We have about 20 iMacs in a suite which will be bound to AD/OD and running iLife, Office, CS5, iLife 11, FCP and Logic Express.

 

Reading through some docs, the consensus seems to be to use local home folders/profile for the media apps, and two network homes (the Windows RM network home folder N: drive for shared docs and aMac one defined on the Pro for data storage).

The idea then seems to be to copy any completed media project from local profile to the Mac Pro for backup etc.

 

Any thoughts/proven alternatives ?

Cheers

[iSteve]

Here we have network home directories served over AFP. Office, CS5 and most of iLife work fine in this way. We created a "temporary local space" folder on the root of each Mac, and tried to get any iMovie users to save their movie here first. The problem with this was that iMovie defaulted to the user's home folder, and staff could not comprehend the difference between working off the local machine and the network. Anyway, iMovie (certainly the older iMovie HD version) was happy to work over the network but I wouldn't recommend it.

 

In our media studies room, we made the computers have a local log in so that the machines become edit macs rather than network computers. Kids work locally on the machines, and they are backed up via Retrospect.

 

The odd iMovie file finding its way on the the network is fine, but if you have a bulk of users doing this then you may have space and bandwidth problems.

[HodgeHi]

I created local home dirs for the video editing on our macs. I used a script to create the home dirs and pushed it out using ARD so you don't need to go to each machine and create them manually if you already have them imaged and ready to go.

 

Edit: here's the script.

 

#Creating a new local user
dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/video
dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/video UserShell /bin/bash
dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/video RealName "Video Editing"
dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/video UniqueID 502
dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/video PrimaryGroupID 20
dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/video home /Local/Users/video
dscl localhost -passwd /Local/Default/Users/video password

 

Run as the Root user.

Edited August 4, 2011 by HodgeHi

[mikelj99]

Thanks for that..

Actually I'm not sure I'm any the wiser as to whether my "nirvana" for the Mac setup is entirely possible...

 

What I'm aiming for:

Creative and office apps that work with the chosen setup (iLife, FCP, Logic, CS5, MS Office)

Ability for student to sign on to any Mac with their AD account and have application preferences follow the user

Dual home directories (one on the Windows server for access to basic user docs and one on the Mac server with the users home folder (or a copy of it) )

 

It seems to me that from what I've read, because the creative apps aren't all network aware, that we have to use local home folders which means that users preferences etc live on the local Mac which in turn means that users basically have to use the same Mac during each lesson.

Is this right or am I completely off-track ?

It seems to tie in with what I've read iN RMs integration doc

Apple Macs and School Networks

 

Cheers

[5tu]

We currently have Macs on an RM network. Mac home dirs point to the same locations as home dirs on windows computers (N:\). Therefore Macs store all user library prefs etc in network home dirs. We then have network shares set up on a NAS (StudentMusic, StaffMusic, StudentMedia etc) and staff/students save any Music/Media work in these shares rather than their home dirs. This is largely due to space constraints on servers hosting home dirs but also to improve performance as the NAS is connected to the same switch as the Macs.

 

I always worried about performance having it set up this way as all data is saved to the network but I can honestly say we've not had a single performance issue over the 2 years it's been up and running and usage is high. Apps we're running include CS5, Logic, Sibelius.

[mikelj99]

OK so you are running with network homes then as opposed to local homes ? (ie in the AD plugin, advanced, User Experience you have Force Local unticked and Use UNC ticked ?

If I do that and fire up say iPhoto, it complains that the file system is unsupported (as it needs an OS Extended volume for its library).

I don't want to hit similar potential issues with other media apps..

[jwab]

OK so you are running with network homes then as opposed to local homes ? (ie in the AD plugin, advanced, User Experience you have Force Local unticked and Use UNC ticked ?

If I do that and fire up say iPhoto, it complains that the file system is unsupported (as it needs an OS Extended volume for its library).

I don't want to hit similar potential issues with other media apps..

 

It's best practice to keep your home folders on AFP due to performance advantages and full permissions compatibility given by AFP. I've run into all sorts of issues with SMB and permissions. iPhoto will have no worries with its library on an AFP volume.

 

What speed is your network and what is the size of the pipe at the server end? Serving media over a network is fine as long as you got the backbone for it. We do it with our Avid network and that runs over a 100mbit albeit our server is 1gig and the contention is only 10:1. Also your share must exceed the limits of the network pipe in terms of output.

[mikelj99]

Thanks- I would go with network home folders over AFP, and our network should be up to it, but our users are already configured in AD for Windows RM CC3 network homes (their N: drive) , and I can't change these.

What I need is a "dual home" setup which I think is possible but only by extending the AD schema .. unless anybody knows different ?

[HodgeHi]

I think you're looking at augmented records if I'm not mistaken.

 

Augmented records override settings on login. Instead of writing to schemas (which in the case of the AD) they have no access to, mac clients get aroun this by 'merging' records from it's own schema on login overwriting the default attribute. I think this is how most dual home dirs are configured.

 

However how you go about doing this I don't know, but take a look at Apple's education /technology videos. I think I watched one which went through the process of creating augmented records.