My personal hell

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?