Power outage then users can’t log in

[homey_the_clown]

Had a power outage last week and every user who was logged in experienced a hang upon logging in again. I checked syslog but nothing screams out at me. The resolution at this point was to simply create new accounts for each user but this is rather extreme given that all that occurred was a power outage- there must be a more elegant solution.
The software these machines are running is:
Tiger with all updates, Adobe CS, Adobe CS2, Office X, Suitcase XI, and FlightCheck 5.

Thanks,
HTC

[Zeheeba]

Is it possible your client machines are setup to mount a share on boot and are not able to find it? I’m not sure if it still happens in 10.4, but in the Mac past, this could be a problem.

The “Mount server upon Startup” box was a nightmare. Just a thought.

Regards,
Z

[andrina]

How are your clients authenticating? Is this a local authentication, or from a server? Can any user log into these machines (if you have multiple user accounts)? In a case where no user account can log into the machine and if your machines have local authentication, and have done their daily cron jobs there will be a backup of the nidb – look at /var/backups/local.nidump, and check the date on it – if it’s pre-power outage, then you’re in luck, and can follow one of the many methods out there for backing up from this file. All that may not solve your issue, but it’s a start – I’d also suggest backing up the whole machine before trying any messing with the netinfo database.
Cheers,
Andrina

[homey_the_clown]

Thanks for the responses so far.

The users are logging in locally to these workstations and this phenomena only occurs for the user that was logged in when the outage happened. Every other account on the machine is able to log in (there is more than 2 local accounts on each machine).

Some users do mount a share when they log in, but all shares are accessible (and were accessible when the machines in question were powered back up).

Unfortunately, I don’t have a useful copy of the local.nidump to study but I do have a spare MAC with the same configuration as the others to use as a guinea pig. I’ll report back anything useful that I discover from that log (or from syslog).
I’m also tempted to have authentication go through our OS X server rather than locally logging in (or at least store user home directories elsewhere).

Again, thanks for your help. I hope to uncover the source of this problem because it’s possible someone else will suffer from it.

[Author]

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