Missing Link

My last two posts covered how I implemented portable home directories on my home network using OS X Server (Leopard) with Open Directory. It seemed to be working fine for all I wanted to use it for – until I checked into things more and found it had stopped syncing with the server on the 8th. Now, it would go through and ACT like it was syncing, and even would report that it had synced successfully. The sole indicator that things were not as they seemed was that the timestamp for the last sync never updated. I decided to look into things in the logs to see if I could see any errors. Sure enough, I could. Using Console, I checked out FileSyncAgent-verbose.log, and saw something along the lines of :

0:: [2008/01/13 17:33:02.224] -[SSyncEngine(private) _generateSyncJobs]: failed with exception “-[SSyncEngine(private) _generatePackageSubjobsWithWinner:loserStates:] (SyncEngine.m:1206): “‘((state.isAddJob))’”"

Obviously there was an error, but the messages in the logs were very much less than helpful. They were downright cryptic! After many hours putzing around trying to find a clue on the ‘Net as to what MIGHT be causing it, I noticed a directory in my home directory on my local machine called .FileSync. I remembered a while back a solution to a weird problem I had (completely unrelated) with shutting down my computer, it was to remove a directory and let it be re-created. So, since nothing ELSE was working for me, I decided to try removing that directory ( i made a backup copy of it first). As soon as I initiated a manual sync after removing that directory it fired through, found a ton of conflicts ( I told it to keep the versions found on my local machine over those on the server), and then it started syncing just fine. I’m still not entirely sure WHAT caused the problem in the first place, one day it was working the next it wasn’t. It could have been something I inadvertently did wrong (and I suspect I botched a conflict resolution somewhere along the line and caused problems) or it could just be the manifestation of a bug. Who knows. At least I know a trick to try should something like this happen again.