AFP share for teachers/students

jrizzle

Registered
I am fairly new to OS X server and server administration in general so bear with me:)

My goal is to setup a share point that will support teacher shares with assignment upload and download folders in each share. I would like to automount these shares upon login so they show up on the desktop.

Currently the teachers have open directory accounts with a Managed preference login item that mounts the share point.

The students are using local accounts in the labs and I've automounted a share for them using a local login item with an apple script that calls a mount_afp command using a dummy account in open directory so I don't have to use guest access.

Currently, I'm just using POSIX permissions to keep things simple as I've ran into disappearing folders using ACL's with Tiger (anyone else seen this??).

So a few questions:

1) Is this an ok way to do this? Are there better ways?
2) Is it a good idea to have a logout hook to remove the mount directory when each user logs out?
3) Will my dual 1.8 Ghz server with 1.5 GB of RAM and a 200Mb (aggregate) network connection be able to support approx 50 static AFP connections? Thinking about taking the idle time down really low...heard in OSX 10.3+ that when connection is idle it unmounts and when user clicks share it will re-mount it, sort of making it dynamic it sounds like.

Any positive help would be appreciated! Thanks!
 
You could just make it into a managed preference to mount the AFP share at login using the Open Directory MCX settings.

Michael
 
Thanks for your response Michael! I will look into MCX settings and see if I can make those work with lab machines that use local user accounts but are bound to Open directory. Basically from what I am thinking, I would want the shares to be associated with the lab computer and not the user. My reasoning in this, is that I don't think I could handle the traffic of having 50+ home directories with documents (possibly pictures/video) mounting everytime and trying to have my server function as a file server for large files for the teacher/student shares. Maybe at some point I can get Gigabit and multiple Xserver with an Xraid. Hopefully thats not too far off:)
 
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