Portable Home Directories

Posted on July 30, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology |

Colleague Joel Ingulsrud is quoted at length in eWeek on the topic of portable home directories on Mac OS X. Basically, all of a users’ files and apps are on a server, and the user can log in from any machine and their email, book marks and files are just there. You can even do this with a laptop that goes off line - the server re-syncs with the laptop the next time it connects.

From the article, it sounds like Joel got PHD to work on his home LAN. I tried it on gulker.com’s LAN with Mac OS X server 10.4 and found it very buggy, not to mention very difficult to configure. Indeed, I decided to switch to inexpensive networked hard drives and tools like FireFox’s Google browser sync and .Mac to get a less richly-featured system, but one that is more robust and much easier to maintain. Whatever happened to AppleShare, the server for the rest of us….?