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Does not work as advertised
Authored by: wsdr on Feb 19, '05 11:11:07AM

I've tried this with the order in NetInfo as:

/Users/user
/Volumes/volume/user

and as:

/Volumes/volume/user
/Users/user

Where "volume" is the name of your external HD and "user" is your user.

In the case of the former, the second value is simply ignored. In the case of the latter, it works fine until you remove the volume-- then the OS will create a folder in /Volumes matching the path above. From that point forward, the home folder on the external volume will be ignored (it gets mounted as "volume 1").

The idea in this hint is for the user to be able to carry around his home folder on an external drive and enable him to use his girlfriend or sisters Mac without copying his folder over. This is really no different than simply changing his home folder value to the value matching /Volumes/volume/user. The second value is simply ignored by OS X, and the missing volume is recreated in the existing, but hidden, directory named "Volumes."

So, if you want your "default" home folder (the one you get when you don't have your external) to reside in the /Volumes folder, then this works just fine. But this hint does not use the /Users/user folder at all.

BTW: I tried "fooling" the system by using symbolic links. I figured that since the system was automatically creating a folder when it couldn't find the real one (and it did this because it _could_-- the path existed because of the way external volumes are handled), then maybe it would fall back to the second value if it failed to create that folder. What I did was created a folder on the HD (test) that was owned by the user in question (user), then I created a symbolic link to the home folder on the external drive. So what I had was:

/test/home

--where home was a symbolic link to:
/Volumes/volume/user

Then in NetInfo I changed:

/Volumes/volume/user

to:
/test/home.

When I logged in as the user, the system delayed about a minute after I entered password. Then it came up to a generic desktop and announced that it could not find the users home folder, and that if I had further problems I needed to contact my system administrator. I tried to take a screenshot of this, but could not-- I supposed this was because I had no home folder, therefore no Desktop on which to put the screenshot. I didn't experiment further and immediately logged out, guessing that without a proper home, it was only a matter of time before the system had problems (since it wouldn't be able to store prefs or caches).



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