We have been providing networked home directories to our AD Windows users off a NetApp for a number of years. Now we are looking at extending that to our OS X users and running into some issues.

If we use network home dirs, OS X (10.5.x) and CIFS direct to the filer everything semms to work fine (the OS X clients and the filer are all in AD).

The problem comes when we try to use portable home directories, which is where the OS X client has a local copy of the home dir and syncs to the filer. We have no problems if it is syncing to an OS X server over AFP or to a Windows server over CIFS. If we go direct to the filer over CIFS, any files deleted on the OS X client are not properly tracked such that when it syncs back to the filer the files reappear (instead of being deleted from the filer). There are also library files which fail to sync. When we remove the filer as the storage all the problems go away.

We've tested against 7.2.4 and 7.3. Anyone tried to use Portable Home Dirs with NetApp storage?