OSX problems

[mmaosx]

Hello I apologize for the long post. I just want to get some feedback. I am an IT administrator for a school of roughly 300 students and 30 staff. I manage over 200 computers in a mixed windows/Os x environment. We have approximately 100 PCs and 130 Macs. We run Active directory and I have an Open directory server managing login for the mac clients. We are in the 5th week of school and I have had no problems with the PCs, 100% of my computer woes are from the Macs. They do not play nice within our active directory environment. I have problems ranging from permissions changing on files and programs not loading, to files disappearing when saving to our windows file server. Sometimes the network share will mount other times it won’t. One big problem is login, randomly the error “AFP SMB Server unavailable cannot log you in” pops up. One second you can login the next second you can not. On some machines after binding to active directory the active directory forest and domain entries disappear and the computer unbinds itself. Completely random events occur with no errors in any logs that I can tell. I have followed all the hints and help forums and even had apple engineers come out to troubleshoot. They recommended I create local accounts on the Macsand have them connect to server to access their network documents rather than have them login through active directory. I do not want to do this I want the children to be able to transition smoothly between PCs and Macs and that means having them logging into their network accounts. I refuse to believe that we are a unique environment. There must be other schools or businesses that operate in the same way without these issues. I am on the verge of giving up and going all PC and saying good by to these macs. I am a mac fan but in our environment they just do not work consistently. I would love to speak with other administrators who run similar environments and see how they fair.

[larkost]

The first thing to check on would be check your DNS all over on your Active Directory setup. Check both forward and reverse DNS entries. The other thing to note is that 10.4 does not work with distributed filesystems. Maybe that will be in the cards for 10.5.

[mmaosx]

Hi thanks for your replies. DNS is working fine. Our home folders are set up with SMB on a windows 2003 server. I am starting to narrow things down and it looks like it has something to do with our AD. Our AD has been buggy I’m not an AD guru. Are any of you aware of where to look on AD as to what causes the error AFP SMB server unavailable cannot log you in at this time?

[mmaosx]

Yes mounting that way works. Only during logon does the error appear. And completely randomly.

[mmaosx]

I am mounting SMB but I seem to have found a solution for my login issue. I found someone who was having the same problem. He suggested changing a setting in /etc/hostconfig. Setting automount -Yes- to automount -no-. So far I have not had any SMB AFP server unavailable errors on the machines I have tried this on. Permissions issues aside this was the biggest headache. I hope this solves it. Thanks for all your help.

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