Mavericks Server Part 35: Mobile Accounts

11/07/14 15:53 Filed in: Technology

Hosting your users home folders on the server can be a great way to allow them to log into any computer on your local network and have their personal desktop show up. It also gives you a good way to manage and back up each of your users data and makes the whole management process easier.

But what happens when a user has a laptop that he/she takes outside the network on a regular basis? When this happens you really can’t host their home folders on the server because they will need access to them on the outside. Yes, they could use a VPN connection to log into their network account and have access to their desktop, but the process is slow and, depending on the bandwidth, could be almost impossible (If you are considering or would like to try to access your home folders remotely without mobile accounts, see my screencast on how to do that here

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To make this particular situation work, OS X Server includes the Mobile Accounts feature. Mobile accounts is a service that keeps a user’s Mac in sync with the home folders found on the server. So when the user comes into the network their computer syncs with the server. This means any work done outside your network will now be on your server making sure you never lose any data. This also means your user can still log into any computer on your network and still have access to the work he/she did while offsite.

In this screencast I cover how to set up the Mobile Accounts Service. I go over how to enable the server on OS X Server and how to get it set up on your client machines. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below or on my Youtube Channel.