Loginwindow Plist Not Updating?

[Bartleby]

I have ~30 client machines in my lab set up to show the network users but not local or admin accounts in the login window, I’d rather not have my account be visible to the student masses. I started to notice trouble when I couldn’t seem to get any of my user icons to be shown in the login window; they came up fine in the fast user switch menu, but loginwindow just showed the generic network user icon. This was annoying but really a minor inconvenience. Then, however, I discovered that one of the instructor’s accounts wasn’t showing up in the list at all. Needless to say, this is a bit more of a problem. After a lot of trial and error, I found the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist and saw that it contained an array called “NetworkUsers” and if I deleted that file loginwindow reverted back to username/password fields with no lists at all. So, it looks like that for whatever reason, my MCX settings aren’t applying to the loginwindow plist. Is there anyway to force the clients’ loginwindow to grab the new data off the server? Thanks.

[Bartleby]

I tried what you suggested but it had no effect. What’s strange is that it almost seems like some settings are working; the restart/sleep/shutdown buttons are removed and the loginwindow message is shown.

The clients were originally listed in the server twice, once from manually entering them and then again from when they bound to the directory. The manual entries were then put into a computer list where all the preferences and settings were applied. I’ve tried eliminating all the duplicate entries, thinking that they could potientially be causing a conflict, but that doesn’t seem to have had any effect. Is there a way to apply preferences to all computers listed in the directory? When I have the “All Computers” computer list selected the, the preferences option is disabled. Thanks.

[Bartleby]

After some more thorough testing, it looks like the clients are in fact picking up (most) of the MCX preferences. If I delete the loginwindow plist and then log out I get the name/password fields. But if I show local only accounts in workgroup manager and then refresh the preferences on the client per your instructions I get a list with only the local admin account and other. So, is there any reason why loginwindow would not be able to discover the list of network accounts from the open directory server?

[Bartleby]

Sorry, I’m mixing up my context. I meant that if I set the login window to show local accounts in addition to the network accounts, it only shows the one local accounts on the clients. When I said “local only” I was thinking in terms of “Allow users with local-only accounts” from the access settings. (which of course has nothing to do with anything; the clients are set to allow all groups)

I tried setting the Guest Computer prefs in addition to computer list I already have (I realized my question before about all computers vs. computer in lists was kind of silly 😳 ) with the same effect. Clients in the guest list grab all the settings correctly but can’t seem to find the users accounts.

Just to reiterate for the sake of clarity (I hope), the clients are actually authenticating to the Open Directory server correctly and can log in using network accounts, it’s just that loginwindow can’t find them when trying to display the users list.

[Anonymous]

I’m having the same issue you describe. The clients (10.4.4) will grab the list of users from the OD server (10.3.9) once, but then it seems they will not ever get an updated list. I have added and removed users, and yet they still appear on the dreaded list. Did you come to some sort of resolution on this issue that you can hand on? Thanks!

[Bartleby]

Man, I kind of forgotten about this. Sorry for the long delay.

MacTroll wrote:

How many total users?
There’s approx 20 users on the list. As a sort of work around, I’ve handed edited the com.apple.loginwindow MCX setting for the computers and added in the array so that I can at least add and remove users from the list. All of the data for the array entries can be gotten from the users’ inspector. For about 20 accounts, this isn’t too much of a pain. 😆

[Author]

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