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Author Topic: User Home Migration  (Read 7939 times)

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Offline Stephen

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User Home Migration
« on: August 11, 2011, 03:49:48 PM »
We are going to start to full out use the macs this year, oh joy more work for me. However I noticed that the home directory of the users is on the hard drive in the mac server itself (a 1 TB Drive). The size of the drive would not suite nearly 1,500 users (including staff).

So I thought what about transfering the user home folders from the xserve to the raid volume. I dont think there is any GUI area to do this in so I am using the command

   
  • sudo ditto ?rsrcFork ?V /Volumes/DataHD/User_Homes /Volumes/Promise/User_Holmes2

    Where DataHD is the source drive
               User_Homes is the source folder
               Promise is the destination drive   (Name of the Raid as well)
               User_Homes2 is the destination folder.

    Then it is a matter of resetting the user homes in Workgroup Manager on the xserve.


    Anyone know any reason why this would be a bad idea let me know before I finish doing it!!!

    There are two reasons why I think it is a good idea.
    1. More space
    2. If a drive fails on the raid it can rebuild it - if it fails on the xserve you need a backup.
        Ok raids can have multiple drive failures and essentially I will be running the system with no backup to the users data.
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One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
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Offline Ray

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Re: User Home Migration
« Reply #1 on: August 11, 2011, 05:02:20 PM »
As you say a RAID (RAID 5 anyway) will be fault tolerant to 1 drive failure so if you had say 7 drives in a RAID5 configuration then 1 could go down and you could still run with the other 6 until you got a replacement drive.

What I would be inclined to do is to recreate the RAID with only 6 drives in it and leave the 7th disk as a hot spare. I know you will be loosing overall space setting up a hot spare but in the event of a disk failure you will be glad you did.

That way if a drive goes down at say 21:00 then the RAID can start to rebuild using the hot spare. By 09:00 the next day the system should be fine. This way you have a bit more time to get a new drive sorted.

I would strongly urge you to consider backups though. I would personally consider a robust backup system almost mission critical in a modern network. It is not so much a case of if a file will need restored as when a file will need restored.
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Offline Stephen

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Re: User Home Migration
« Reply #2 on: August 12, 2011, 09:00:04 AM »
I actually do not know what configuration the raid was built in. However it is a 12 drive raid with 12 x 1TB HDD and offering 9.09TB. True I would rather have a backup system and I am wondering if I could talk the powers that be into getting something like a 6 drive QNAP (6 x 2) to use as a backup raid. (some hope but I will give it a go, cost would be ?1600 on amazon so flip knows how much the school would have to pay for one!!).
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One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Jung

Offline Stephen

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Re: User Home Migration
« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2011, 02:25:21 PM »
I actually missed a step out before setting the user homes in the workgroup manager goto the server admin and select the old root home folder (in my case User_home) and deselect the Automount option then goto the new USer home and select the automount option. You will need the ldap admin username and password for this.


Ok so now I have moved my users and everything is working well I need to figure out how I actually get the network share for that user to open automatically rather than having to log in and then goto go -> connect to server-> server name, enter your password and select the share. Easy in windows, cant see how to do it on the mac just yet - most of googling the subject comes up with connecting to a windows share or some such. Other solutions suggest some applescript programming type stuff. Anyone know of any reliable way - surely this is something you should be able to set at the server level for when the user logs in - typical last hurdle is a killer.
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One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Jung

Offline Si

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Re: User Home Migration
« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2011, 02:36:08 PM »
This is what you get for lining Steve Jobs's pockets.. :)
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Offline Stephen

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Re: User Home Migration
« Reply #5 on: August 13, 2011, 02:12:38 PM »
Wasnt me who decided to buy macs or pay for them but I have to say in some aspects the OS is really good but in others it is a pain. Maybe it is just because I dont know enough unix and I am not up on the OSX commands. I know in the past on windows I have sorted stuff out with batch commands etc. Pity when I went thru uni that they only taught us unix for two hours but spent two years on cobol and pascal (they said unix was on its way out - shows how much they knew!).
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One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Jung

Offline dfinney

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Re: User Home Migration
« Reply #6 on: August 15, 2011, 10:08:20 AM »
We looked at this for backing up our system, if you have a hunt around you can get it for ?1200 - ?1300 (without HDD's)

http://www.thecus.com/product.php?PROD_ID=46

Stephen i think automator or apple script is your only way at the minute, we've upgraded to lion server here but were only testing the profile manager section at the minute for provising our iPads, ill have a look and see if they have made any changes and let you know.
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