Problems with network home folders

[JamesM]

Hello, I'm running the Plaxo AB plugin at home and work. It's been working fine at home but at work it never seems to store my login credentials or the fact that I've previously synced. Whenever I open AB after logging I'm prompted for my Plaxo creds and asked if I want to sync for the first time.

My home folder lives on an Xserve shared over NFS.

I work at a Mac software company and I'm familiar with all of the debugging tools. If there's something that I should be checking please let me know.

[dcolace]

Thanks very much for writing in about this. It seems apparent that the Plaxo preference files are having a problem either being created, updated or read in your ~/Library/Preferences directory.

Can you let me know if you see any com.plaxo.* files in your home Preferences directory?

Also, when you first sign in to your Mac account, does the Plaxo menubar item (StatusItem) startup by itself, or does it only come up when you launch Address Book?

You're not NetBooting, right? You just have your Home directory on the Xserve?

[JamesM]

Thanks very much for writing in about this. It seems apparent that the Plaxo preference files are having a problem either being created, updated or read in your ~/Library/Preferences directory.

Can you let me know if you see any com.plaxo.* files in your home Preferences directory?


In ~/Library/Preferences:

com.plaxo.Plaxo.contactData
com.plaxo.Plaxo.data
com.plaxo.Plaxo.groups
com.plaxo.Plaxo.plist
com.plaxo.PlaxoAddressBook.plist

are all non-zero length.

Also, when you first sign in to your Mac account, does the Plaxo menubar item (StatusItem) startup by itself, or does it only come up when you launch Address Book?

It launches by itself.

You're not NetBooting, right? You just have your Home directory on the Xserve?

I'm booting from a local drive with a networked home folder.

[dcolace]

James-

Thanks for providing the details I inquired about. It sounds like all the critical pieces are in place yet something is amiss.

If you don't mind running a little experiment, perhaps we can make some headway as to why Plaxo for Mac is continually asking for Setup.

Can you go through the Set-up Plaxo process on your work computer (again); can you go through the initial sync step successfully?

After the intial sync completes successfully, dismiss the Plaxo Setup window and go into Terminal (I'm sure your not shy of it). In terminal, enter:

cd ~/Library/Preferences
defaults read com.plaxo.Plaxo Name

Is your Plaxo user account name (email or screenname) correctly displayed?

Next, go to one of the Plaxo menus and see if you get the normal menu with the "Configure..." option. Is it available to you or are you only getting the "Setup Plaxo" option?

If you can see "Configure" in the menu, select it: it will default to the "Account" panel. Are the two text fields for email/screen name and password filled in? If they are filled in, click the Validate button. Do you get a message saying that your credentials are okay? If so, go back to Terminal and repeat the commands I listed before. Do you see your Account Name displayed?

Can you next, ensure Address Book is quit, then select Quit from the Plaxo menu item. Now, launch Address Book again. The Plaxo menu item will reappear. Does the Plaxo menu contain only the Setup Plaxo option or is the full menu available?

Aside from this little experiment, I was curious whether or not you ever access your shared Home directory on more than on computer at a time. Just curious if your prefs could get in a Read Only mode if you were accessing them from two Macs at once.

[JamesM]

James-

Thanks for providing the details I inquired about. It sounds like all the critical pieces are in place yet something is amiss.

If you don't mind running a little experiment, perhaps we can make some headway as to why Plaxo for Mac is continually asking for Setup.

Can you go through the Set-up Plaxo process on your work computer (again); can you go through the initial sync step successfully?



Yep, when it does it's "Initial sync" it does actually sync data from the web site.



After the intial sync completes successfully, dismiss the Plaxo Setup window and go into Terminal (I'm sure your not shy of it). In terminal, enter:

cd ~/Library/Preferences
defaults read com.plaxo.Plaxo Name

Is your Plaxo user account name (email or screenname) correctly displayed?



Yep, my login email address is in there.



Next, go to one of the Plaxo menus and see if you get the normal menu with the "Configure..." option. Is it available to you or are you only getting the "Setup Plaxo" option?



The menu bar icon has the normal menus under it.



If you can see "Configure" in the menu, select it: it will default to the "Account" panel. Are the two text fields for email/screen name and password filled in? If they are filled in, click the Validate button. Do you get a message saying that your credentials are okay? If so, go back to Terminal and repeat the commands I listed before. Do you see your Account Name displayed?



Credentials are listed in the account tab. Pressing validate the first time returns nothing but pressing it a second time shows a tiny message beneath the password field that everything is ok.



Can you next, ensure Address Book is quit, then select Quit from the Plaxo menu item. Now, launch Address Book again. The Plaxo menu item will reappear. Does the Plaxo menu contain only the Setup Plaxo option or is the full menu available?



Full menu but the setup wizard still appeared. If I use the configure option under the menu my credentials are still listed.


Aside from this little experiment, I was curious whether or not you ever access your shared Home directory on more than on computer at a time. Just curious if your prefs could get in a Read Only mode if you were accessing them from two Macs at once.

Very rarely do I login to another machine using my networked account. Here's what the pref files look like

[jam @ James.local]>ls -la com.plaxo* ~/Library/Preferences
-rw-r--r-- 1 jam omni-sta 10026 May 25 09:56 com.plaxo.Plaxo.contactData
-rw-r--r-- 1 jam omni-sta 14981 May 25 09:56 com.plaxo.Plaxo.data
-rw-r--r-- 1 jam omni-sta 2393 May 25 09:56 com.plaxo.Plaxo.groups
-rw------- 1 jam omni-sta 414 May 25 09:58 com.plaxo.Plaxo.plist
-rw------- 1 jam omni-sta 91 May 19 15:04 com.plaxo.PlaxoAddressBook.plist

The path to my home folder looks like:

/Network/Servers/server-name/Volumes/XRAID/Users/jam/

[dcolace]

Yep, when it does it's "Initial sync" it does actually sync data from the web site.

Yep, my login email address is in there.

The menu bar icon has the normal menus under it.

Credentials are listed in the account tab. Pressing validate the first time returns nothing but pressing it a second time shows a tiny message beneath the password field that everything is ok.

Full menu but the setup wizard still appeared. If I use the configure option under the menu my credentials are still listed.

Very rarely do I login to another machine using my networked account. Here's what the pref files look like

[jam @ James.local]>ls -la com.plaxo* ~/Library/Preferences
-rw-r--r-- 1 jam omni-sta 10026 May 25 09:56 com.plaxo.Plaxo.contactData
-rw-r--r-- 1 jam omni-sta 14981 May 25 09:56 com.plaxo.Plaxo.data
-rw-r--r-- 1 jam omni-sta 2393 May 25 09:56 com.plaxo.Plaxo.groups
-rw------- 1 jam omni-sta 414 May 25 09:58 com.plaxo.Plaxo.plist
-rw------- 1 jam omni-sta 91 May 19 15:04 com.plaxo.PlaxoAddressBook.plist

The path to my home folder looks like:

/Network/Servers/server-name/Volumes/XRAID/Users/jam/


Thank you so much for running through those little checks. All the info you provided was very helpful in understanding the state of the Plaxo software.

Your use of NFS for your home directory has revealed an oversight in our code. The long and short of it is that NFS is a case-sensitve file system whereas the default for Macs is case insensitive (though the option is there to enable case sensitivity). Because of this, the code that engages the Setup routine, believes that a particular resource file is not available and thus puts up the Setup Wizard.

We've corrected the problem for the next release of Plaxo for Mac. If it isn't reasonable for you to stay logged into your account (so you don't have to shut down Plaxo for Mac) please feel free to contact me privately if you'd like to test using our latest internal builds which should address this problem.