Portable Homes allow a user to disconnect their system from the network and continue working. But Mobility, Portable Home Directories and other network sync accounts have a major shortcoming: they have to communicate with a server. Mostly because they rely heavily on directory services and the data that moves with a user needs to synchronize between computers that the user moves to. In the event that users have large home directories or a lot of multi-media content, this can create a lot of network saturation. In large environments where there are no limits on how big these directories can get, this can also be cumbersome to storage.
Apple recently released external accounts. An external account can live anywhere (ie – a flash drive or a Firewire drive) and keep all of the data for a user (account information and home directories) in a centralized location, without the need of a directory service. This means that you could theoretically issue all of your users a 32GB jump drive, give them more space than you likely could have otherwise given them and allow them to take their data home or move it between computers without being on a network or communicating with a directory server.
In many environments, moving data between multiple computers can cause an issue with applications. You see, in many environments, not all applications are installed on all computers. Which is where OS X Portable Application comes into play. OS X Portable Application is an open source product that allows you to put an application on a jump drive and move it between computers, much as you would do leveraging an automount in a directory services environment. The application does not need to be installed on any given computer but instead runs directly off of the portable media. I’ve only looked at open source applications running on top of OS X Portable Application, but given that the open source alternatives to all the common Mac OS X software is available it doesn’t seem like a stretch to think that it is feasible that you could do a mass deployment leveraging external accounts + OS X Portable Application and supply users with jump drives, creating a fully consumerized and streamlined network environment. In our testing though, it might not be wise to expect kindergartners to keep up with jump drives… And you might expect that those provided to preschoolers will end up with teeth marks!
Applications that can currently be made portable:
- Safari
- iCal
- Address Book
- iChat
- Abiword
- Adium
- Audacity
- Camino
- Celtx
- CheckOff
- Cyberduck
- Feed
- Firefox
- Gimp
- Inkscape
- Newspeak
- NVU
- OOo
- RSSOwl
- Sunbird
- Thunderbird
- Vienna
- VLC
- X-Chat Aqua
