FCP & Co. on a Oben Directory managed Workstation

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

No issues using OD, in fact, this is very common in collaborative pro apps environments. The primary thing to pay attention to is the type of OD accounts you use. There are a few options, but for users who use their home folders for FCP or CS (for project files, cache, render files, etc.) you should be using network managed local accounts. This means that the home folder is stored locally, but your machine is bound to OD and permissions are controlled through OD. This is a great way to work and allows the network admin to leverage everything OD has to offer. You would set this in Workgroup Manager once your machine is bound to OD and tell the home folder to live in /Users/. The first time you log in on the machine, a home folder will be created locally on that machine and you would use it as you would any other home folder.

The main reason you’d want to keep home folders local is performance – if your home folder lives on a network, you have a bottleneck which can adversely affect the performance of your pro apps. For example, in Xsan environments, local home folders managed by OD are the most common choice.

Some people choose mobile home folders, but this can become quite cumbersome with syncing and such, and isn’t necessary for most environments.