AD plug-in causing high CPU load on AD

[Anonymous]

Wondering if anyone else has seen this – we have an AD domain running on Windows Server 2000 (WS2K is actually a hosted OS running in VMWare on top of Linux).

All has been fine on the servers for PCs in the domain. I managed to bind Mac OS X 10.3 machines to the domain, but soon afterwards started getting complaints from our AD administrators that they were causing cpu usage “spike” on the AD servers. Whenever a spike would occur, the server’s CPU usage would go up to 100% for 20 seconds or so and then drop. This would then repeat every 2 minutes or so. Taking the Macs (and there have never been more than 5 or 6, whereas there are hundreds of PCs in the domain) out of the domain brought cpu usage back to a more normal level.

The other thing we noticed is that AD reports that they are “Domain Controllers”, not “Computer/Workstation”.

[sketch]

[quote:85976bed84=”deejemon”]The other thing we noticed is that AD reports that they are “Domain Controllers”, not “Computer/Workstation”.[/quote:85976bed84]

Not sure about the CPU load, but we have seen the DC issue. It’s really odd since in the properties of teh machine it says it’s a workstation/server. If you do a “find” for Domain Controllers, no Macs appear. But it still says it’s a Domain Controller.

[sketch]

was teh spike on the domain controller(s), file servers, etc? Or all of the servers?

[Anonymous]

The “spike” is on the AD domain controllers. Most of our file-servers are Samba on Linux/Solaris – AD has only really been added to support central authentication for our Windows clients.

Since 10.3 now integrates very well with AD (and it seems to be about the only way to get off-line support without creating a whole separate new user list (we have 4000 staff members and 40,000 students) of accounts on OSXS.

[Author]

Posts