[MacTUG] replicant of a profile manager??

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

Hi guys

As I move towards using profile manager to manage my mac labs, I have rebuild my second mac mini server to also be running 10.8.

Previously this server was set up to be a replicant of the master server for Open Directory, but I am at a bit of a loss for good old Profile Manager as I am not sure even if it can be a replicant. (I know I can have OD be a replicant on 10.8 servers, but it is profile manager that is the question here.)

Now I know that the profile manager is not as mission critical as Open Directory is/was. For example in the 'golden triangle' scenario, OD is involved in every authentication process. It appears that once a computer is enrolled with the profile manager (and they have communicated with each other about how the client should be configured, etc.) that the involvement of the Profile Manager is pretty minimal until we want to change the behaviour of the computer.

As an example I tested a mac using the 'golden triangle' (a 10.6 mac relying on Open Directory) and a mac using the Profile Manager (a 10.8 mac). I shut down all my servers and logged in with a client that had not been on either computer before. The 10.8 mac behaved flawlessly with the servers shut down — all the profile manager settings were applied to this new client. This all makes sense as the Profile Manager was designed from the ground up to work with devices that are not always connected to the network. This is a good thing. The 10.6 client did not perform as flawlessly, as some of the settings were not properly configured. (BWT, it still functioned, but was not as tweaked as I would want. For example, it did not show any system prefs, whereas I want clients to set some settings, such as mouse speed. But at least is erred on the plus side of things.)

So I know from experience that the profile manager is not as mission critical, it really only needs to be there when 1) a new computer is being enrolled, and 2) when changes are made to how I want the clients configured. Given that, I can live without a replicant (knowing that with good backups I could get a new profile manager up and running in an a few minutes of realizing it was down). But, does any one know if one can have a profile manager replicant??
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