AFP Home Directories Not Mounting; User logs off instantly

[chip19]

I have a rather simple Tiger server setup at the moment. I plan to complicate things, but I want to get the fundamentals working first. Right now I have three services running… AFP for network homes, DNS for name resolution and forwarding to my ISP, and OD for authentication. OD and DNS seem to be working, as the users can login and pinging my FQDN resolves to the local IP of the server. I also setup the LDAP search path using the FQDN and login works, telling me that DNS is OK.

I have setup the Home structure as so:

/Volumes/FilesHD/HomeDirs contains four folders: teachers, astudents, cgraphics, and ybook. These are all the groups on the system. What I want to do is have the users home directories stored within those subfolders of HomeDirs.

I tried this two separate ways. First, I created an AFP share point for the HomeDirs folder, and then I set it to automount for network home directories. I then setup the user’s homes to point to, for example, afp://servername/HomeDirs/astudents/user. This did not work, as I got the common error: “The home directory for user XXX cannot be found in the usual place.” that I’m sure you’ve all seen. I tried some of the basic troubleshooting steps like restarting the client, but nothing seems to work.

I then tried another way. I got rid of the share for the HomeDirs, and then I created four separate shares for each of the subfolders (astudents, teachers, …) with all set to automount network home directories. I then simply selected the automatically-created entry under the Home tab for each user. I also created a few new users to make sure no problem would be related to changing the path of the directory. The network home path now looked like afp://servername/astudents/user.

Now I don’t get an error message, but something else happens that I’ve never seen before. The user logs on and appears to have a network home directory. However, creating things on the desktop is only saved locally and not on the server. In other words, if I make a file test.txt on the desktop, it will be there when I login again on that computer, but it is not saved on the server under the appropriate home directory. I also notice that with these logins, the home directory only contains the Desktop and Library items, while the network home has all of the usual elements (Sites, Public, Documents, …).

I checked the logs with this second method and found something interesting. In the AFP access log, I noticed that when I log in, the user logs onto the AFP server but then logs off immediately. For example, this is one log entry:

IP xx.xx.164.2 – – [17/Aug/2007:11:33:42 -0500] “Login testuser” 0 0 0
IP xx.xx.164.2 – – [17/Aug/2007:11:33:42 -0500] “Logout testuser” 0 0 0

You notice that the user logs in and logs out immediately. I assume this is why the network home isn’t being properly mounted, but I’m not sure of the cause.

It is important to note that I CAN get the home directories to work… this is what I have to do. I create a share for the HomeDirs directory, and I make the user’s home directory within that, NOT within the subdirectories. Then when I login everything works normally… the user has their home directory and they can save and open things in their home folder. The problem with this is it does not allow me to do what I want… I want to organize the user home folders based on their group. The users are constantly being flushed, and I wanted an easy way to delete all of the same group in one fell swoop (deleting from WGM does not delete home folder as you know). Beyond this, I want to give the teachers the ability to see their own students but not students from the other classes.

If you can help me solve my problem using my current configuration, or you know a better way to accomplish the organization that I want that will have a better chance of success, please let me know. Any help would be greatly appreciated…

Rob

[chip19]

There aren’t any other automounts; just these ones for the home directories. When I use Go in the Finder, it doesn’t seem to be able to find them either. It lets me browse normally, but what I see seems to be a cached local version of the network mounts. For example, I can see a folder for one of the test accounts that I have deleted a while ago. What it looks like to me is the client is somehow using a local version of the network share, and that is why it doesn’t give me an error about not being able to find the home directory.

Should I perhaps try logging in with another client?

[chip19]

I tried another client machine, and it showed the same results. Confirming my theory of the local cached version of the server, it only had the user’s folder that I had logged into. It had the full structure of the server under /Network/Servers/myserver/FileHD/subdirs. But inside those subdirs was nothing; it was empty, despite there being at least two user home directory in each on the server.

I also tried a Tiger client, since I have since been testing with Jaguar clients. This produced a different error message, that it can’t load the home directory because it’s on an AFP server. (you know, that common one).

However, I finally did find the problem. It was the permissions of the various share points. They were set to have the teachers group as read only, but no one else other than admin could read or do anything. Under Panther Server, which is where this server is being upgraded from, doing that didn’t cause this problem. It seemed that if the subdirectories (meaning the home directories) had the right permissions, the parent directory’s permissions didn’t matter. In Tiger Server, however, this does not seem to be the case. It seems the user needs at least read only access in order to be able to use the automount share point.

I have since tried logging in with multiple users and everything seems to be golden. Thanks for all the help 🙂 Now I just need to setup some managed preferences and I should be good. If only the many, many clients are going to be this easy to upgrade >_>

[Author]

Posts