Re: waiting for nfs home at login

On Sep 25, 2013, at 1:53 AM, Axel Rau <[email protected]> wrote:

> Am 23.09.2013 um 20:26 schrieb Karl Kuehn <[email protected]>:
> 
>> On Sep 23, 2013, at 8:26 AM, Axel Rau <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> I have a 10.6.8 OSX server which uses OD with strong binding of the clients (most 10.8.5).
>>> User homes are served via nfs (with Kerberos authentication) from this server.
>>> Occasionally, the login completes before the nfs mount has completed, which trashes dock and finder preferences permanently.
>>> How can I make sure, loginwindow waits until mount is complete?
>>> There is one client, which produces this log entry on the server if it happens:
>>> ---
>>> userInit[2482:907] CFPreferences: user home directory at file://localhost/Network/Servers/zeus.do.main/Exports/Users/fred/ is unavailable. User domains will be volatile.
>>> ---
>>> This user has no managed preferences and the client computer has only a login message text.
>> 
>> 	I don't have an easy solution for you. But when I ran into a similar problem with AFS (not Apple's AFP, but the only formerly called "Andrew File System"), I wound up having to write a AuthPlugin that I put after the user had done most of the authentication that waited for the AFS system to be ready to serve up content. It might work to do that for you. You are going to have to do some work on it if you go this route, since this is older code, but I did open-source it at:
>> 
>> http://code.google.com/p/loginwindowtools/
>> 
> I have already a loginhook running, but it fails occasionally. It's a shell script, which simply checks for network user and loops (with a sleep 1) until ~/Library/Preferences appears.
> Understanding the Launch-Architecture right, I would say, I need a WorkingDirectory parameter with an argument of a directory in the users home in com.apple.{Finder|Dock}.plist
> If I'm right, this would delay Finder and Dock until that directory appears.
> 
> Any comments?

	I am not sure, but my testing some years ago (and a number of major revisions ago) was that loginwindow scripts were called early in the login process, but did not necessarily hold up the rest of the process. The tool that I pointed you at runs as an AuthPlugin, which does run to completion before anything further is permitted. It is harder to make and install, but if you absolutely need that (and I did) then it might be the only solution.

	Of course, your own testing would get you a better answer than my old memories.
--
	Karl Kuehn
	[email protected]