Clients with network home folders cannot log in

[ianpiper]

Hi all,

I had to power down my network over the weekend, and since restarting I find that clients with network home directories cannot log in. I have set up my clients with photos that display on the client machine login screen and these have been replaced by the generic image. I get the error message that says “You are unable to log in the the user “ian” at this time”… etc. I see from searching that this was a common problem with 10.3.9 but I am running 10.4.9 everywhere, so I suspect a different cause. In any case I have tried a number of the fixes suggested at that time (such as clearing and restoring the Open Directory connection on the client, etc.) to no avail. One other odd thing. The Open Directory service pane in Server Admin shows the service being in an odd state: the Start Service button is green, but greyed out – i.e. I can apparently neither start nor stop the service. It is an OD Master.

Can anyone suggest a good approach to isolating the cause of this problem?

Thanks,

Ian.
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[pksupport]

This same problem is driving me nuts!!!!! It happens on any mac (even 10.4.10) and all it takes is a restart to fix it. I I saw the AD post and the tip about long AM points but I haven’t changed anything there and the mounts are under 64 characters. I wish I could find a solution that works.

I am running a bog standard xServer with AFP only – no AD nothing clever – it’s a simple as can be. Anyone with more clues on this is most welcome . . .

[ianpiper]

I spent a long time working through a number of approaches that I have seen for this problem. In my case, what finally sorted it out for me (and it has not recurred since despite a number of restarts) was to sort out my DNS service. I had a number of inconsistencies between the DNS running on my Mac OS X Server box and the DHCP service running on my wireless ADSL router. Once I had cleared those out I found that the DNS and OD services restarted OK and my clients could log in again. None of the other common causes ascribed to this problem had any noticeable impact.

Ian.
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