OS X, Radmind, Login Hooks, Death

[jbnlsd]

Hello… My name is Jason Bennett and I am a tech for a K-8 school district. I’ve been testing out Radmind for next school year and had a nice little test lab that has given me no problems. I moved out to a school for testing and then the problems started.

My setup is:
User accounts on Xserve running 10.4.9 with network home folders
Authentication via Active Directory on some PC servers – Win2003
Clients are eMac G4s (and one intel macbook) – 10.4.9
OD on the Xserve is set up with user groups and computer lists.

My problem lies in the mounting of the network home folders. As it stands, the school is using Network home folders since September with no problems. When I bring in my testing computers, about 1 in 10 logins (less if I’m actually trying to get it to happen to test things) results in the home folder not mounting and it spits out an error and the user can’t do very much. It seems to be more often if the computer sits for a period of time. However, I haven’t found the magic touch that will make it fail every single time.

I believe it lies somewhere in the login hooks. They run as bash scripts on login. Some just do maintenance on the machine while some copy files to and from the network home folder or setup symlinks. If I shut off all of the login hooks… the problem disappears. If I then turn back on the ones that don’t touch the network home, still fine. Once the hooks that touch the network home are reactivated, the problem will return.

On the other hand, If I add these scripts to the old computers in the school, they work fine every time… So it’s not just the scripts.

I thought maybe it was just that sometimes the scripts ran before the network home was mounted, but that wouldn’t kill the home folder mount, would it? I imagine the scripts would fail and then the folder would mount and everything would be fine except the apps that rely on the scripts. I’ve also tried putting a script that runs before the rest that waits to make sure the home folder is there (an adaptation of Brian Hanson’s script) with no luck.

The last bit I have at the moment is that it seems to only be users who are located on one particular Xserve. We have an Xserve for each school and I haven’t seen this pop up with anyone except people at the school I’m testing at. I’ve got to test this a bit more before I’m positive this is the case, but I figured I’d toss it in there anyway. This server has been acting a bit strange in the last few weeks.

I’ve been working on this for a week and I’ve gotten nowhere. I would really appreciate if anyone has any insight on what I can try to get to the bottom of this. Thanks for reading.

– Jason Bennett – New Lenox School District 122

[Flash]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: jbnlsd[/u][p]

The last bit I have at the moment is that it seems to only be users who are located on one particular Xserve.

Is Guest access allowed in AFP? Are you excluding Guests from idle-disconnects? Mounts occur at startup as Guest as far as the server is concerned. Authentication as a real user doesn’t actually occur until the user logs in – the share must already be mounted as Guest for homedir to be correctly attached. For instance, a machine that fails to correctly map a homedir – what do you see in Network/Servers/ before restarting? You should see all server mount points. Just a thought.

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