OS X 10.4.9 Server + SMB Network User Homes problems

[zebrac]

Hi,

Today, I have a new problem to tackle. This time, it is making SMB network user homes work, under OS X 10.4.9 Server. To paint the picture:

1. I have a stand alone open directory master configured. It lives on, for want of better IP: 192.168.0.10

2. I have a windows/solaris/other box, with an SMB share on it, “world” writeable, living on 192.168.0.20

3. I have created an automount for this SMB share within the Mac OS X server NetInfo preference pane. This was relatively easy to achieve. After this, I set it up with a mount-record within WGM so that it was shared out via both AFP and SMB.

4. I created a test user – and ducted his/her home area to the available home area’s within the “Home” tab of the WGM. I pressed “save” and “create home directory now” button. Sure enough, on the other side of my little test lab, the directory popped up within my /networkuserhomes dir on the SMB share. Within this, was the correct skeleton I’d expect of a network userhome:

[i]
/Applications/
/Desktop
/Library
/Movies
/Pictures

…etc.[/i]

5. So, I took a client machine, popped into the admin account and went into “utilities”. At this point, I ticked “LDAPv3” and configured it so that it pointed at 192.168.10 (the Open directory master). All seems well so far.

6. Next, I logged out of the admin account – and (as expected), on the login window “other” was available, suggesting network user homes were available. Good, I thought.

7. I try to log in with my test users credentials. It crunches for 5 seconds, then comes back with a classically/tragically ambiguous error:

[i]”The account is unavailable at this time – the home folder for the user account is located on an AFP or SMB server. Contact your systems administrator blah blah blah”[/i]

What?

Have I missed a crucial step here? All my mappings look correct. It made the home directory in the right location – what has gone wrong? Permissions? Authentication?

Thanks. 🙂

z.

[delarius]

I’ve seen this happen on AFP network homes. In my case, when I looked at the logs on the server that hosts the machines it had this notation in the system.log:
Jul 3 08:44:03 myserver crashdump[23963]: automount crashed
Jul 3 08:44:04 myserver crashdump[23963]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/automount.crash.log

Sure enough since the machines with network homes weren’t able to automount the user folders before login, they couldn’t connect. A restart of the server seems to have fixed the problem, although, I rather suspect that simply restarting AFP on the machine might have worked too. You can usually determine if it’s unable to mount the directory in question by logging in with a local account and looking in /private/Network/Servers/myservername/ if it appears that there is nothing inside this location, odds are that you aren’t able to connect to that server via automount.
Hope this is helpful,
Del

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