Dual Booting Leopard and Windows

[ingenious7]

Hi,

I am experiencing problems on Mac computers that are dual booting with Windows. There was initially a time conflict with Leopard 10.5.8 not syncing the time after a reboot from Windows (fix was a registry setting in Windows to make it store time as UTC).

Now logging in to a Leopard computer bound to AD works, but on a dual boot computer it does not work. What does seem to work is this:

– unbind then rebind computer – works upon multiple restarts, until a user boots into Windows then back to Mac
– some computers seem to work booting from Windows to Mac, etc.
– doesn’t appear ot be any consistency (I am probably missing something though!)
– I thought it was all related to the time being wrong on Leopard compared to the Domain Controller – sort of worked but no cigar!

Anybody in a similar situation with it working?

[sheridanp]

I have not tried this yet, but will tomorrow,

I am going to run a unix command called ntpdate -b during a system startup script. this will force the system initiate a time sync during startup.

Once the time is then synced directory services should be able to connect to directory authenticator (OD or AD), no worries.

If you want to look at specifying commands during system startup I would recommend looking at the lingon utility (www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28365) or lingon.sourceforge.net/ it will provide you with some baby steps resolving your problems.

But I am no Macintosh expert, so good luck with it. 😉

[ingenious7]

Hey,

So the problem was definitely time related. I tried syncing the time from Leopard using a startup daemon and running the ntpdate -b but no luck – I might be doing something wrong. What has definitely worked was setting the way Windows stores time to UTC in the registry:

[code]Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
“RealTimeIsUniversal”=dword:00000001[/code]

Windows then needs to be rebooted. From then on it seems to be fine when we image Leopard from the Net Book server it authenticates to AD every time, even through multiple boots to Windows and back again. For computers that we don’t want to reimage, we just need to log in to OS X, make sure the time has synced or force a sync, then remove all AD Directory Utility configs and re-add them.

I am really not sure why Leopard by default wouldn’t do a time sync on startup! It seems utterly confusing. Does any one know if Snow Leopard does a time sync on startup?

[honestpuck]

ingenious,

10.5 DOES do a time sync on startup but if the time difference is too great it will not adjust the time.

If your AD server and your clients are pointing to the same time server then the best way of fixing this problem is to run ntpd early in the boot process with the -g and -q parameters. BTW ntpdate is deprecated and will disappear one day – ntpd now does the same thing with the -q param.

So try replacing your ntpdate command with ‘ntpd -g -q’ and see if that fixes it. Works for me.

// Tony

[ingenious7]

Thanks Tony – I wasn’t aware that Leopard did any time sync as a part of the update, though I still think it should be able to manage 8 hours!

I did see the ntpd command so I will look in to that. Did you use Lingon to get the daemon to work? For now I’ll stick with the Windows change – I’d rather change the beast.

[honestpuck]

I don’t actually use Lingon – I hack the launchd items by hand – but yes, I did use a launchd item.

I have a bunch of small things I do in the same launchd item that runs Bootpicker.

// Tony

[sheridanp]

Great Stuff,

You learn something new everyday, thanks for the heads up honestpuck on ntpdate, will make changes accordingly

[Author]

Posts