10.3 to 10.5 OD Migration w/ Hardware migration

Hi all, first post here, hopefully someone has some experience with what I’m attempting to do and can share some tips 🙂

Here’s the setup – My existing open directory server is running on 10.3.9 on PPC hardware. My users are all setup with mobile accounts/Portable Home Directories on a mix of tiger and leopard clients. The portable home directories are stored on a fiber attached raid and served up through afp. Since the ppc hardware is aging and I want to take advantage of the features in leopard server as an OD server, I’m trying to migrate both to leopard and new hardware all in the same shot.

What I’ve done so far and what’s broken – I built up an entirely new quad core server running leopard using a new server name, new dns name, exported all of the old user and group information from WM on the panther server and imported into the new server. Exported all the ldif information using PHPLDAPAdmin from the old server and imported into the new. Created a faked home directory mount using a firewire drive attached to the new server to act as temporary storage until I can take the old server offline and put the new one into production. Also on the new server for testing purposes, I’ve installed DNS, created the A-Record for the server name, then created an alias for the old server name pointing to the new server name. The reason for the cname is that from what I’ve found, once a PHD is established on the client, there is no way to change the server location where the files are stored.. at least that’s what I’m finding, but if I’m off base, please let me know as that may fix a lot of issues. I’ve tested against this setup using both a Tiger and Leopard client. On the tiger client, my test user can login, I can write files to the desktop, initiate a home directory synchronization and it synchs to my faked home directory volume on the firewire drive. Everything works beautifully. But, with a leopard client, it takes about 20 seconds to authenticate against the server, once it auth’s, everything still works great.

So now that my long winded explanation is done, the only issue I can’t seem to resolve is how to get the Leopard client to authenticate without taking 20 seconds each time.. nothing odd shows up in the client system logs or any of the servers logs for system, ldap or open directory.

If anyone has had any experience in migrating open directory with a phd/mobile user setup over to 10.5, i’m open to any and all input 🙂 And if maybe there’s a totally different way I should be approaching this.. again.. any input would be awesome