AFP548 - Topic: SMB Home folders on Tiger Client

This topic has 9 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 17 years, 9 months ago by Dimarc67.

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May 31, 2007 at 2:22 pm #369183

m3oliver
Participant

I’m trying to join a Tiger client (10.4.9) to a AD domain where the users home folders reside in a SMB share on a FreeBSD machine.
Joining the machine to the domain was no problem, but when I attempt to login with a AD username the mac just hangs at the login screen.
I am able to ssh to the machine while this is going on by using a local administrator account where I see the following lines in the log over and over…

automount[1577]: Can’t mount server.domain.ca:/username on /private/Network/Servers/server.domain.ca:/username: Invalid argument (22)
automount[1577]: Attempt to mount /automount/Servers/server.domain.ca:/username returned 22 (Invalid argument)

If I check the “Force local home directory on startup disk” box, I am able to log in to the machine, and it mounts my SMB home folder on the desktop, however it also creates a folder in /Users/ which I don’t really want.

I have read similar reports of this problem but haven’t found anyone talking about a potential solution. Does anyone out there know how to get around this problem?

June 4, 2007 at 12:50 pm #369219

m3oliver
Participant

I believe so… When I log in with my AD user (with the force local home dir, which is the only way it works currently)
A Kerberos ticket is created and seems to be valid, however when I attempt to mount the share manually it still prompts me for a username and password, shouldn’t the kerberos ticket be kicking in handling that validation?

June 4, 2007 at 7:06 pm #369222

m3oliver
Participant

So I noticed something strange…
When I try and log on to the mac using my Active Directory account I just get the spinning beach ball, with those automount errors slowly but surely filling up my system.log…
However if I ssh to the machine (using a different mac, and using my AD user account while the other mac is hanging) I get my shell, but more than that it allows the mac that’s hanging at the login screen to successfully log in and mount my smb home folder!?! Why is that happening???

June 11, 2007 at 3:26 am #369284

Dimarc67
Participant

Hi, Oliver.

I built and support a network of 14 Intel iMacs bound to Active Directory on Windows Small Business Server 2003. All user accounts have their home folders redirected to SMB shares on the server, and for the last year, everything’s worked quite nicely…until 10.4.9. For any system I updated to 10.4.9, it caused the exact issue you’ve described. Yours is the first mention of this issue that I’ve found on the net over the last two weeks.

I, too, was able to discern the issue is with mounting the SMB share during login, but your information about the logs is more than I knew. Sounds like your describing an issue with the authentication credentials not being properly transmitted by the AutoMounter (assuming it’s that script that does this). Seems to me that OS-X has a history of various sorts of issues of this type with SMB shares..

My work-around for the time being was to re-image my affected systems back to a 10.4.8 image. The Rosetta/SMB printing issue that 10.4.9 is supposed to resolve isn’t critical here, so 10.4.8 is good enough for now. I’m very interested to hear anything else that’s been discovered about this, or if there’s anything I can test on my end to bring more information to light.

Thanks.

David Marcus
New York, NY

P.S.–Incidentally, all of our iMacs are also running Windows XP in Parallels, and all are joined to the domain with the user’s My Documents folders redirected to the same SMB share as their home folders. Along with Roaming Profiles, this means a user can log on to any station, Windows or Mac, and still have all of their files immediately available in the default folder. It’s really sweet.

June 12, 2007 at 9:44 pm #369293

kirkg@kkheconsul
Participant

We had the automount issues with 10.4.9/AD and SMB homes also, but no spinning beachball. It usually resulted in a a login error that “Your network home is on an AFP or SMB server, please contact your administrator”. If we hit OK, then tried again, it would usually work. This was only when we were creating mobile homes, if doing network homes it seemed to work OK, but being wireless we needed the PHDs. We tried Apple’s automount fix @ http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303841 with no affect. Kerb is all good as far as we can tell.

June 13, 2007 at 6:49 am #369297

Dimarc67
Participant

Thanks, Kirk, but what you describe, though possibly related, is different than the issue we’re experiencing. In fact, in researching this problem, I came across the article that you provided. Unfortunately, the solution offered there does not solve this issue. In fact, editing the AUTOMOUNTER as the article directs actually caused the very behavior that it was supposed to correct. (Go figure.)

David Marcus
New York, NY

June 13, 2007 at 11:47 am #369299

d.maltby
Participant

Hey, I was having this problem a while back with some clients being fine & some not, I never 100% solved the problem (as now then hang on a 2nd login, so if one person log’s in logs out the next it will hang)

we found that one of 2 things fixes this either giving the machine a static IP, this seem’s to work sometimes but the one one that works the best (as per apple’s instructions) is to delete the contents of /private/network/servers

I wrote a little Applescript script to do this, just prompts for the machines etc & then opend s ARD & sends a unix command to the machine

Hope this helps

Dave Maltby

June 24, 2007 at 10:43 am #369351

krunk
Participant

Hi All,
I have read all posts above on this issue.
I have around 400+ macs and about 300+ PCs
I am having the same problem, the login window gets stuck

you put the MAC to standby and out and then try to login and it works as a blink.

Have cleared the /private/network/servers but didn

July 16, 2007 at 9:39 am #369513

Dimarc67
Participant

SOLVED?!

Well, I just pulled an all-nighter, and I think I’ve got this licked (at least here).

The real bear in troubleshooting this was that it wasn’t entirely consistent. Every now and then it would work on 10.4.9, and every now and then it would fail on 10.4.8. Very frustrating. System.log indicated non-specific NFS mounting failure issues.

One of the articles I came across talked about an 89-character size limit on the SMB share name that I thought I might be violating, but I didn’t even break 80 characters (big let-down, that).

Finally, I stumbled onto this article:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061129130301551

It speaks of “startup stalls” that apparently were/are an issue going back to Security Update 2006-007 (#2), and prescribes editing the /etc/hostconfig file to change AUTOMOUNT=YES to =NO.

Amazingly, it worked. My AD users can once again log in and have their home folders correctly mounted and available transparently. The side effects mentioned in the article are inconsequential to our environment, and, in fact, I may not turn the AUTOMOUNT back on for a while, if ever.

The fix took 45 minutes to change all our systems. The research took countless hours over many weeks, culminating in one hellacious night (been here since 6pm yesterday). Crossing all limbs nothing else rears up…

Good night,

David
New York, NY
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