Log in fails if AD is down

Hello everyone,

I’m in the final testing stages of implementing a magic triangle, and need to know if I’m running up against a feature, a bug, or just normal behavior.

All accounts are mobile, we don’t have anyone hosted on the server. I’ve put AD users in an OD group, and they can log in fine and create a local home folder. When the OD master is taken offline, they still log in fine. If both AD and OD are taken offline, they log in fine. However, if AD is down, but OD is still up, they refuse to log in successfully. I know it’s still trying to authenticate against a directory service and isn’t find the users, since OD just points them to AD, but it doesn’t make sense to me that it should fail, given that there’s a local copy of their account. Should it not just simply use the cached credentials?

I’m doing this testing for disaster recovery purposes, and need to know that if AD goes down, our Mac users can continue to work. Obviously if they’re already logged in, they’re fine, but I’m thinking about long term outages.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Jeff