Need some help or advice.

I’m trying to manage a G4 XServe.

Recently, because of super slow login times for machines outside the lab where the server lives, I was rather blindly following a tutorial on getting DNS working properly. I made the mistake of demoting the server to Standalone and thereby wiped out the LDAP database.

I’ve restored/reloaded all of the accounts with the help of Passenger, and I can successfully mount shares using ‘connect to server.’

What I can’t do is what I’ve been calling a ‘Desktop Login’ from machines in the lab. I get an authentication shake-off.

What’s confusing me is that certain settings having to do with computer and domain names are different than they were before and I can’t seem to come up with the right combination of settings to enabel authentication and login.

Originally, I was using the static IP address of the server for all settings because using the server name never seemed to work.

For example, logging in to Workgroup Manager over VPN only worked by IP address, and I used the IP address in the Directory Access settings on the client machines.

One place I’ve noticed the change is in the home directory settings.
What used to be: afp://IP address/faculty/testuser, is now, afp://localhost/faculty/testuser.

What was /Network/Servers/msxserve/Volumes/data/homes/ is now /Network/Servers/msxserve.hackleyschool.org/Volumes/data/homes/

I figure there is nothing wrong with the FQDN being in there except that I think my DNS setup is all wrong.

Should I be running the DNS service on the XServe? If not, how can I get the XServe to be “listed” as a citizen on the network with the Windows DNS server.

The name of the server is msxserve or msxserve.local, and I don’t think I added msxserve.hackleyschool.org anywhere in the settings.

Sure could use some help with this.
Thanks,
Dan Jewett