Missing Link

A few weeks ago I managed to get my hands on an Apple XServe. While an older one (a G4) it’s still plenty powerful and quite the powerhouse. Compared to my Dell servers I’d say it beats all of them, hands down.

Ever since getting the server and playing around with Leopard server I’ve fallen in love, so to speak (no Ann, you don’t have competition). I’ve found that tasks that would take a long time in Linux take a matter of minutes in OS X Server. Administration is really a breeze in most cases – IF you know what you’re doing and are able to do a little self help. Apple’s website has a veritable treasure trove of guides and documents explaining the finer details of the various services available in Leopard server, as well as how to get them up and running. All you have to do is read.

My friend, who is very skilled at running Apple servers, helped me get everything set up to use my xserve as my gateway, and to get open directory set up (and using kerberos nontheless) . Using open directory and Samba, both of which come standard as part of OS X Server, I was easily able to set up network user accounts and home directories that are able to be used on both windows and mac clients on my network. While that was nice, there was ONE thing really holding me back from taking advantage of all that – my macbook pro. I’d been using my macbook pro as my main computer for quite a while now, since I got it really. All of my music, all of my photos, all of my documents were located in my user account there. How, then, could I get that data and put it into my open directory account?

I struggled for a while to find a method that would enable me to do it, and finally broke down and asked my friend for his help again. He preambled that I should only try this if I have backups – something time machine has thankfully made available to me (and something I’ve been taking advantage of for several months now). He then suggested creating a new admin account on my macbook, then using some software called Synk to sync what’s in my main user home directory to the home directory on the xserve. So that’s exactly what I did. After that it’s a matter of setting up in workgroup manager to allow the home directory to be a “mobile home directory” meaning a copy of it exists on both machines, and are synced between them in the background.

So, Synk seemed to work just fine. It took a good long while (~1.5 hours) to sync all of my data to the server, and that’s over gigabit ethernet. After it completed I logged into my network account from my powerbook – all of my files and folders were there, my itunes library worked just like it had on my macbook, iPhoto SEEMS to be ok, though i wasn’t able to open it (the version on my powerbook is older than the version on my macbook, and informed me it couldn’t open the library until I upgraded it – so at least it SAW the library and noted it was a newer version).

The next step of the puzzle, for me anyway, is to repave the macbook with a fresh install of Leopard. That’s happening as I write this. Once I’ve completed the install I have to join the macbook to the open directory server, which takes all of 1 minute, and log in with my network account. It should ask me if I want to enable mobile home directory for that account on that machine, and once I say yes, begin the long process of syncing all of my data back to my macbook.

With THIS setup I’ll always have my data available, regardless of which machine I choose to log into.

I will post tomorrow about the success or failure of the process. Should it fail not all is lost, my time machine setup should enable me to restore everything to it’s initial state without much trouble should something go wrong. Having a safety net is the ONLY way to go with things like this.

Hopefully tomorrow brings good news

[tags] OS X, Leopard Server, Open Directory, Apple, XServe [/tags]