Aside from the files an OS X Server shares across your entire enterprise, there’s often the desire within individual workgroups to have private storage areas for their own projects. These group folders are essential for departments like HR and Accounting, but they can also be helpful for less security-conscious groups as a staging area before sharing their final work company-wide. Fortunately, while the process of creating these file shares isn’t obvious, it also isn’t complicated.

The first time a VP brought you their iPhone to configure, it was a new toy. It was fun, even if it took twenty minutes of typing on that tiny onscreen keyboard. Now with version 2.0 and Exchange support, the iPhone it isn’t new or a toy anymore, but it would still take you weeks to individually configure all the iPhones your company needs.

Since Mac OS X premiered in 2001, a wide range of applications have shipped with installers in Apple’s .pkg format. While the contents of these installers were originally browsable in the Finder or from the command line, determining exactly what will be installed (and where) can still be a difficult and time-consuming process. It’s made all the more frustrating by the fact that .pkginstallers lack an uninstall option, making such detective work a requirement to completely uninstall some third-party software. And in Leopard, there’s a new “flat package” format, which can’t even be read without Apple’s Developer Tools.

You’ve just installed a new hardware firewall with the same IP as one that’s being replaced. Your routers can all see it, but traffic from your Macs seems to just disappear. Or you’ve renamed a series of servers the whole company uses, and the Macs can only find them by IP now. You know you can just reboot the problem machines, like you’d power-cycle an unmanaged switch, but that solution is impractical during business hours (and time-consuming on nights or weekends). How can you force a couple hundred Macintosh computers to update their network caches?

Last week, in part one of this series, we took began deploying Portable Home Directories, reviewing their prerequisites and enabling the mobile managed preferences. This week we’ll continue the process, by setting up an AFP share to host our user homes and configuring our Open Directory accounts to take advantage of them.