I didn’t know where to put this so I thought I would post it here. I have been working on a problem with a locking xserve that is member server of another xserve PDC. Both have home directories of Windows users on them. The member server has been locking up since day one and I finally figured out the cause.

Looks like a bug with Samba and Apple where if you host home
directories on a member server (that is a OSX server), the server won’t drop windows connections. It even starts new connections for the same user each time they access the server. After a couple hours it would show over 400 people logged in (duplicate IP’s) when only 15 were. I saw one IP in the windows connections box 20 times. The server eventually locks up.

It looks like its an issue with NT authentication. I say this because I was
able to resolve the issue by making it a Stand Alone windows server instead of a member. Which doesn’t make any sense…. But it worked. My guess is that it forced the server to us Open directory auth, instead of NT auth from Samba.

It works because the stand alone has the same user and groups since its a replica or connected to another directory system.

I can replicate this problem any day, just set up a PDC and a Windows member server and put home directories on the member server. Start logging in users and watch your connections triple. To bad no one at Apple could help me with this, it would seem this is a pretty obvious bug.

Just thought I would share this.