Managing Users on Tiger Server

[jroller]

I am a yearbook adviser/journalism instructor at one of our local high schools in Charleston, SC. I am responsible for maintaining my lab — the only mac lab in the district. My lab sit “inside of” the school’s network, which is part of the district network.

I have a diverse collection of roughly 25 Mac models from probably 2nd gen iMac (candy colored) to Mac Pros, all purchased piecemeal over the last 9 or ten years. These run Tiger – Snow Leopard. We also use an Xserve G5 running 10.4.11 unlimited wit 2+GB RAM.

I have grown to the point where I would like to use the server to manage my individual users instead of simply having generic user accounts on each workstation. Mainly, I want to do this so that if I need to dictate what specific groups of users can do I can dictate this at the server level instead of having to go to each workstation and setting the limitations for each account on each machine.

I feel comfortable with creating users and groups on the server; I have done that for years. What I cannot wrap my head around is how to set up the clients so that students login with their individual user account info (on whatever machine they choose for the day). That is — specifically — I cannot get the client machine to login to the server with a network user’s name and password.

I suspect the problem is one related to DNS service.

I set up DNS on a standalone server. Tried host servername in terminal and got a proper response (per some directions I stumbled upon). This supposedly was the first step. I then proceeded to set up an OD Master per those instructions.

In fact, what do you know…. those instructions came from this website! Just realized that. Here is the link: https://www.afp548.com/filemgmt_data/files/quickstart_tigerserver.pdf

Followed these instructions as precisely as I could, including starting with a fresh install and running all software updates.

I can see the ODM server (xserve.maclab) on the Client side and select it/set it up in Directory Access on the client.

Create a new user (andersonco) with home directory on the server. Try to login from the client: Other… name: andersonco pass: abc123

The client login is “shaken” away and the fields go blank. That said, the terminal test on the server works fine, but when I try the same test in Terminal on the client (host xserve.maclab, or whatever) the request fails.

Thus, my suspicion that it is a DNS issue.

But, as I said, I am a teacher, not a network guru, and I swear I have researched as much as I can, but I am stumped at making this work. (by the way the linked article is far and away the most user-friendly document I have found).

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance..

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