Creating Network Home Folders problem

[coolpor2]

Hi All

Here is a problem i’ve noticed recently that has affected our os 10 environment. I’ve seen this same problem reported before, but no conclusive resolution steps have been put forward, so i was hoping that someone on the boards can give us some insight into it.

We have a single Xserve G5 running 10.4.4 setup as and OD master and attached to an Xserve RAID via direct FC connection, the raid array is the storage location for all our users network home folders, all network home folders were created without a problem when our 15 or so user accounts were initially created in Open Directory. But recently i deleted and then attempted to recreate the network home for a user account but nothing happens when i click Create Home Now in Workgroup manager.

I’ve looked at the known issues surrounding this problem, namely DNS and Share permissions and nothing appears to be out of place.

Our DNS is handled by a Windows 2000 server box, not ideal i know, but we do have fully qualified forward and reverse lookups for all our client machines (via DynamicDNS) and for the Xserve (manual entries).

I’m not sure about the share point permissions, is there anyway to check the os x server logs for permissions or folder creation errors that may have been logged when attempting to create the home folders.

The biggest headache for me is not being able to decipher from the opendirectory and afp logs in server admin as to what or where the problem is. I’m not even convinced that these are the best logs to check. If someone could point me in the right direction and advice on the best way to use the commandline “createhomedir”

….I attempted “createhomedir -a” on our xserve but that had no affect, do i need to use particular switches for it to do what i’ve described above ?

[Anonymous]

This problem is most always an issue with the name of the server being different from what is in the user’s home directory specification in OD.

In terminal, do the following:

1. hostname

This should return your fully qualified domain name.

2. dscl localhost -read /Search/Users/

Replace with the name of one of your users that isn’t working.

Look for a record called ‘NFSHomeDirectory’. It will be something like:

/Network/Servers/server.domain.com/Volumes/Data/Homes/username

If the ‘server.domain.com’ in the NFSHomeDirectory does not match what ‘hostname’ returns, the home directory creation will fail to work.

[coolpor2]

The problem of creating network home dirs cleared up after a reboot of the server and all machines. I don’t know how
and why it was fixed.. i’m none the wiser except that homedir creation is now working without fault, however now i’m gettting an even more serious problem as a result of the restart, the problem is that network accounts are failing at login with the following message;

"Unable to login at this time….The home folder for the user account is located on an AFP or SMB server."

This is not a machine specific problem but it is account specific – the majority of accounts are affected but some are not.
Here are some checks i ran at the server using the dscl commands;

1) The hostname and NFSHomeDirectory records for the users DO match up

2)When using dscl /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1/Mounts i get the following two options;

macsvr1.mydomain.com:/Volumes/Data/Home
macsvr1.local:/Volumes/Data/shared

i then look at the macsvr1.mydomain.com in more detail, and heres what i see;

cn: macsvr1.mydomain.com:/Volumes/Data/Home
mountDirectory: /Network/Servers/
mountOption: net url==afp://;AUTH=NO%20USER%[email protected]/Home
mountType: url
objectClass: mount top
AppleMetaNodeLocation: /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1
PasswordPlus: ********
RecordName: macsvr1.mydomain.com:/Volumes/Data/Home
RecordType: dsRecTypeStandard:Mounts
VFSLinkDir: /Network/Servers/
VFSOpts: net url==afp://;AUTH=NO%20USER%[email protected]/Home
VFSType: url

All these options look fine to me, although i’m not sure about the net url== entries.
Everything looks ok in WGM inspector for each user pointing to the correct network shares.

Any ideas ? I’m sure it’s probably something very simple.

[stickboy11]

I wrote up a nice, long post answering parts of this issue, but the message board keeps "detecting" it as spam and deleting it.

Heh, someone fix that and I’ll repost… 🙂

[jayartibee]

I am having the “user folder is on an AFP server” error too. There MUST be a solution to this.

[Author]

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