Network Login

[Hunt]

On MacOS X is there ANY way to, on a network, allow a user to login through the standard os x login dialog on any computer without having to buy OS X server? And when they login all their preferences, documents, etc. become active (like the desktop pic changes to what they specified).

For example user Fred has his home folder stored on computer A. Computer A and computer B are networked together. Fred wants to login on computer B. He logs in and his lovely desktop picky and preferences are all there waiting for him...

Computer A and B both only have MacOs X 10.2 Client Version!!

How do I do this? Can it be done?

Thx,
Hint

[theed]

If you want real terminal on a network, the network is the computer kind of networking, you need to live on a client server model.

That being said, your server doesn't necessarily need to be of a Mac OS X Server variety. However, synching multiple machines without have a single authoritative source, which probably won't act like a client, is not what modern networking is about. Maybe in a decade. You get the kind of experience you are talking about if you have the user directory centrally shared, and mounted over NFS to all of the client machines. You need the machines to agree on what UID's everyone has. This is not something that's going to be easy without a server. And the only really completed solution for you at this time is Mac OS X server for mac OS X clients.

I've been living with a college sun network where your desktop follows you from workstation to workstation, and it's been great for like 6 years now. Sun: the network is the computer. But the users folder reside on a network appliance, not on any individual client machine. Our network also has a full time admin, and a couple of part time admins to deal with the complexity of this setup. It's great for users, it offers power that isn't available any other way. But you are talking about a fairly involved and tweaked experience. Not at all an out of the box experience.

You may not need Mac OS X server, but I think you need a server in your scenario. At the very least you're going to waste a lot of time getting NFS shares to happen on the command line, and you'll need to make sure you manually create users on one machine to match the other machine, and manually map the user's folder to the NFS drive instead of the normal location. That's the key, right there. I think you're going to run into permissions hell if you try to share a folder that used natively on one of the machines. ... have fun mucking about in netinfo trying to tweak all of the stuff.

Sorry I'm not helpful, I just wouldn't recommend doing what you're asking. The server product is only $500, $250 if you're in education. How much do you get paid? How many hours would it take for you to tweak this system into existence without Server? Learning is one thing. Frustration is a slightly different thing.

[Hunt]

Thanks, but...

Can't I share the NetInfo db or something. And then get the other computer to recognise it?

I'm just a student doing this for my family. I cant event afford OS X server and my parents wouldn't buy it. They basicaly said "if you can't get it to work, it dosn't matter. We'll just find another way"

Plenty of people must have done this before or am I wrong?

And I only want to network an iMac and a iBook together over ethernet so that my father or me can login on on each others machine. So couldn't I setup a server on each machine and get the other to recognise it?

I'm a unix newbie so that's probably going to be a problem.

I mean you can login to a remote computer through the terminal why can't you get OS X to do it?

Hunt

[theed]

That's actually something that Mac OS X is not good at. At least not yet. This is something that you've simply chosen the wrong unix to do. Every other Unix, including NeXTStep included the ability to run things remotely but display locally. Mac OS X lacks this, or more precisely Aqua lacks this. The OS is capable of displaying X Windows programs if you install an X Window server but that still isn't enough to get Mac OS X to even try to display remotely.

Unix machines which do this are usually tweaked to depend on the network, and have solid, wire based network connections. They will likely crash and burn if you yank the network cable out.

Long story short, you're not the fist person to try this, or to succeed at it, but you would probably be the first to succeed at it using Mac OS X. It's simply not done here. This is one place where this Unix may grow into a far more mature Unix in the future. Right now, you're simply requesting a feature that has been dropped and abandoned.

Sharing a netinfo database can certainly be done, but it's ugly even when you have the right toools. Doing it without them is simply not an effective use of your time. Hell, creating a modern network based on netinfo is probably a waste of time. LDAP should be taking over all of those responsibilities, and Apple seems to agree. But still, you're talking about a lot of uncharted territory on Mac OS X. You could look into directory services, and see if you could define the user's home directory to be an AFP alias or UNC path or something, but I think it's going to want a real directory, which means NFS, which is another thing to learn and makes your computer twitchy about dropped network connections.

I'd just try to figure out a way to share a major directory between all logins so that you can put stuff there and grab it from wherever you are. I need to get Macs to log in against an Active Directory structure, and later probably an Open LDAP structure. I'm not looking forward to it. It hasn't been fun researching it thus far.