Network Client Login Windows Frozen with Beach Ball

[general_ludd]

I have a long-standing problem with clients on my 30-40 client managed Xserve 10.4.11 network. Some clients will freeze at the login window before one can select his/her username from the list of Directory users. This doesn’t happen to all the computers and doesn’t happen to specific machines more than others. I can’t identify any errors in the logs on either the server or the clients that point to this problem. This happens mostly on the computers where a list of users is the login window default, but that is the dominant configuration on the network, but it has happened with the text-based login as well.

To narrow down the problem to a particular service, I have tried binding half the machines to the OD using their IP address, and the others using the domain name. This does not have any impact. I have moved DHCP services to a Linux machine to see if DHCP might be causing the problem. This does not have any impact either.

Kerberos is reporting no errors on the server, and is fully functional once a user is able to log in, and the problem seems to happen almost exclusively with the 10.4 clients, this may only be because there are far fewer 10.5 clients on the network.

All computers have been updated to the latest version of their respective OS, but this problem has been present since before any upgrades.

All 10.4 clients are built on a common image.

Most of the time the only way to solve the problem is to shut down the computer (either using SSH or locally by forcably shutting down the computer–and why did Apple remove the soft restart switch/key combo?) Then the users can usually log in just fine.

NOTE this is not the same as the evidently more common problem of freezing after having entered a username and password.

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