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Network and Portable Home Directories |
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 I have a few Macs around that I use for different things. The thing I hated the most when using multiple macs was if I did something on one that file or preference I made was not on the other. Not anymore. I have mac os x server running on my mac mini. Starting with 10.4 server apple introduced something called Portable Home Directories. Basically it lets you put your home folder on the server and it keeps a synced copy of it on any mac that you want. The reason I haven’t done this sooner was the mini had a 40 gig hard drive and my laptop had a 100 gig drive. I couldn’t get my home directory to fit on the mini if I wanted to. Part of a backup solution I needed to do made this all possible. I bought a cool little device call the MiniStack v2 which is a hard drive enclosure that fits under the mini. It also adds more firewire ports and USB ports. I put a 250 gig drive in the MiniStack and now my laptop is in sync with the server. If my wife needs to use my laptop I can jump right on the mini and keep on working. The other cool thing you can do once you have the portable home directories set up is the ability to get all the information of your home directory over the network. For instance my wife has an account on the mini but not on my laptop. Now she can log into her account on the laptop and it will open her home directory on the mini. Everything is read and written directly to the mini while she does it and the speed is not bad even over a wireless connection. I know that most people will never have a need for it but if you have more than one mac in the house it is really worth looking into.
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