Spinning ball after sudden disconnect from AFP and LDAP

[Anonymous]

I’m in an office with several computers networked and authenticating to an Xserve via LDAP to mount several network share points via AFP. Most computers are 10.3.9, one is 10.4.

Right now, there’s a problem. When a person is logged into their machine through their LDAP account, with the network shares mounted, if they experience any interrupt in network access, the entire OS locks up with a spinning ball, even other applications that are running. Finally, OS X will give a ‘Disconnected from Server message’ after maybe a full minute. This happens even if network access is immediately restored after the hiccup (putting a loose ethernet cable back in or what have you).

Sometimes the OS recovers after it gives the disconnect message and re-mounts all the user shares except for the user’s Home folder which is on the Xserve, but there is always the spinning ball complete lockup.

[steve]

I think a lot of people go through this – it certainly happens at my office (with a similar set up) all the time. Apple doesn’t seem to care about fixing this problem, it’s been around for years now! It’s hard to believe Apple doesn’t consider this a major problem – it’s hugely disruptive, especially when, like you said, you reconnect them almost immediately but still have to wait 5, sometimes 10 minutes before you can use the machine again – if it unsticks itself ever! For some of our older (still OS X 10.3) machines, one tiny network blip means a restart. Hardly the picture of stability I think Mac OS X was meant to inspire. When Windows does a better job of handling networking, you know something’s amiss.

We generally find it more expedient just to reset the machines, hard, whether we think they’ll come back up or not. Of course, if you have frequent outages you might consider upgrading your network hardware – we did that and it fixed a lot of this just by virtue of the network being more reliable. Also consider upgrading to and using Tiger’s mobile home folders, it allows you to store the home folders locally and just sync with the server – so when the network goes out, maybe the Finder will still lock up, but you can still get by in Photoshop or whatever for a little while (just don’t try to open any files).

[Author]

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