My personal hell

[harwoodr]

Here’s the situation:

1. I have a 10.4 server running on a G5 tower.
2. The DNS is operated by the university IT group and our reverse DNS is mixed case… asked and they’re not going to change it.
3. 10.4.6 introduced some funky stuff with FQDN, DNS and case sensitivity issues.

So… before I changed anything after the 10.4.6 update… users couldn’t log in because it couldn’t get their home directories…

The automounter would be looking for:

/Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/Users/username

While if you looked in /Network/Servers/ you will see:

/Network/Servers/servername.psychology.mcmaster.ca

(note the case)

Alright – moving on:

4. Tried changing hostconfig HOSTNAME – only worked on local server (and you’re not supposed to do this anymore).

5. Used changeip same IP address, lower-case name to mixed case name… now users could log in…. glory!

6. Argh… they can log in, but can only intermittently actually get their home directories… seriously. You log in, see your desktop and *flash* it’s gone… clicking on your home directory or desktop in finder gets you ‘The volume for “Desktop” cannot be found’… doing “cd ~” and then “ls” from a terminal window sometimes gets you your directory, a partial directory or an error… and even then the ownership maybe the user or root…

7. Looking in the logs we see:

[code]May 25 14:48:26 client kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /private/Network/Servers/servername.psychology.mcmaster.ca/Users, flags 524288, pid 490
May 25 14:48:26 client kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_MountAFPVolume: GetVolParms failed 0x16
May 25 14:48:26 client automount[490]: Can’t mount servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA:/Users on /private/Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/Users: Invalid argument (22)
May 25 14:48:26 client automount[490]: Attempt to mount /automount/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/Users returned 22 (Invalid argument)
May 25 14:48:26 client automount[489]: Can’t mount servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA:/Users on /private/Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/Users: Invalid argument (22)[/code]

(server and client names changed to protect the guilty).

I’m stumped… and it’s to the point that the owner of said server (a staunch apple supporter) is asking if I can replace the server with a Linux box with LDAP/AFP/SMB…

Any help here?

[sciron]

Bear with my questions as I am a Unix person thrown into an Apple world.

> The automounter would be looking for:
> /Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/Users/username

> While if you looked in /Network/Servers/ you will see:
> /Network/Servers/servername.psychology.mcmaster.ca

assuming that the next item after ‘Servers/’ is the FQDN, there is no issue there. However, why would you specify ‘/Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/USERS/username’ to mount? ‘/Users/username’ is NOT part of the FQDN. When specifying mount locations from another machine in Unice-land, you specify it thusly:

FQDN:/Users/username (or servername.psychology.mcmaster.ca:/users/username). The colon is the separator telling the system that that part is not part OF the FQDN name, but an object ON the FQDN object.
I know OSX handles things similarly because 1) it’s FreeBSD based, and 2) check out how to mount NFS, and specifics in FSTAB.

[harwoodr]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: sciron[/u]

Bear with my questions as I am a Unix person thrown into an Apple world.

> The automounter would be looking for:
> /Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/Users/username

> While if you looked in /Network/Servers/ you will see:
> /Network/Servers/servername.psychology.mcmaster.ca

assuming that the next item after ‘Servers/’ is the FQDN, there is no issue there. However, why would you specify ‘/Network/Servers/servername.Psychology.McMaster.CA/USERS/username’ to mount? ‘/Users/username’ is NOT part of the FQDN. When specifying mount locations from another machine in Unice-land, you specify it thusly:

FQDN:/Users/username (or servername.psychology.mcmaster.ca:/users/username). The colon is the separator telling the system that that part is not part OF the FQDN name, but an object ON the FQDN object.
I know OSX handles things similarly because 1) it’s FreeBSD based, and 2) check out how to mount NFS, and specifics in FSTAB.

[/QUOTE]

Doesn’t work that way under OSX… especially for OpenDirectory attached clients… (LDAP & AFP… automounter isn’t configurable… and I can’t specify the user’s home directory mount point like that)…

What I’ve done for the time being is revert to a server image I made a while back – 10.4.5 – it’s not worth it…

So, we’ve established a moratorium on upgrading OSX servers for the time being.

I’m going to install OSX server on a non-production system and upgrade it all the way… and see what happens when they next release an update.

[harwoodr]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: macshome[/u]Did you update the user records to match the case change?[/quote] Yep – changeip actually did that.

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: macshome[/u]Automounter is configureable. Check man automount. You can also edit the mount by hand in NetInfo Manager in case WGM is doing something funky to the case when you save.[/QUOTE]

I’ll have to look into that…

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