xServe stops authenticating

I have an xServe running 10.3.7. It’s been bound to our Active Directory domain. I can see users in AD from within WGM. I have created a group in WGM and added users from AD to that group. I’ve created a share in WGM, and gave rights to the group I created for that share. All was working fine, users could log in.

Authentication was working fine on it for the first couple days after it went into production (and during our week of testing). Out of the blue, the machine stopped passing authentication to AD. When I went into WGM, I got the infamous -14002 error (unable to open directory node). The only way I could get it to start letting people log in was to unbind the server from AD, then rebind it to AD. Once I did that, then restarted, people were able to log in again. This has happened twice in one week now.

One more symptom I’m running into is that I can NOT see AD groups in WGM….even after the machine has been running for 2 weeks. (I understand it takes a while for these to show up sometimes?)

Am I missing anything here? If anyone has any ideas I would be eternally grateful. I pushed to get this server put in place as an alternative to another Windows box, and the way it’s been running has just been confirming my co-workers idea that Macs suck as servers.