Re: [Ihook-discuss] mkdir as network user

[Louis M. <lo...@mo...>]

Hi Andrew and List,

Apologies for the lack of timely response to this and thank you to  
Andrew and Gary for their replies.

Essentially we are still having this problem, but it seems that mkdir  
is not the actual culprit.  Below is an explanation of the behaviour  
we are experiencing.  If anybody can confirm or deny that this is  
happening to them it would be great to hear from you, if anyone can  
see anything wrong with my reasoning, your response is also very  
welcome.  Basically i am at the end of the road, myself and several  
others have tried everything we can think of to solve this one with no  
luck, it has held up our leopard deployment for a couple of weeks  
now.  So here goes...

Lots of previous discussion around the ~Library/Caches/TemporaryItems  
folder. To sum up, that folder needs to reside on the same device as a  
document being saved by certain GUI apps. Which makes life interesting  
for those running network home accounts wanting the ~/Library/Caches  
folder to on a local drive.

On Tiger, running a login hook to symlink TemporaryItems from your  
local Caches directory back to somewhere in the network home folder  
worked fine. On Leopard, I can craft such scripts that execute  
flawlessly when simulating log-in by running them as root in a  
terminal window once already logged in, and the awkward GUI apps can  
save fine through the double symlink: huzzah.

However, when that same script is run during log-in, it fails. Our  
awkward GUI apps cannot save. Actually, the loginhook script doesn't  
fail, but later in the log-in process, the folder that TemporaryItems  
is redirected to is removed: having a symlink as the file object there  
obviously confuses the routine that handles this.

If you run the same scripts but replace ~/Library/Caches/ 
TemporaryItems with a different folder name everything works fine, so  
its definitely caused by the OS's relationship with the TemporaryItems  
directory.  In fact the behaviour makes a fair amount of sense,  
TemporaryItems being a temporary folder that you might well want to re- 
create/clear our at login, unfortunately the OS is confused by the  
symlink we are trying to create.

In case anyone was wondering, we don't want to have all of ~/Library/ 
Caches in the home account because of our 250MB quota.

As i said, any insight anyone can give would be much appreciated.

Regards

Louis Mustill - Mac Support
MPC
127 Wardour Street
Soho, London, W1F 0NL
DDI - + 44 (0) 20 7494 7902
Main - + 44 (0) 20 7434 3100
Lo...@mo...
www.moving-picture.com


On 24 Jul 2008, at 20:16, Andrew Mortensen wrote:

>
> On Jul 24, 2008, at 3:13 PM, Andrew Mortensen wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jul 24, 2008, at 7:50 AM, Louis Mustill wrote:
>>
>>> mkdir -p ~/tmp/temporaryitems
>>
>> mkdir -p has the side-effect of discarding errors. Try:
>>
>> echo %LOG OPEN /tmp/mkdir.$$.errors
>> mkdir ~/tmp
>> mkdir ~/tmp/temporaryitems
>> echo %LOG CLOSE
>
> I meant to add that the error output will then be saved in /tmp/ 
> mkdir.[PID].errors, which you can check for error messages after  
> things fail.