[Dimarc67]

SOLVED?!

Well, I just pulled an all-nighter, and I think I’ve got this licked (at least here).

The real bear in troubleshooting this was that it wasn’t entirely consistent. Every now and then it would work on 10.4.9, and every now and then it would fail on 10.4.8. Very frustrating. System.log indicated non-specific NFS mounting failure issues.

One of the articles I came across talked about an 89-character size limit on the SMB share name that I thought I might be violating, but I didn’t even break 80 characters (big let-down, that).

Finally, I stumbled onto this article:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061129130301551

It speaks of “startup stalls” that apparently were/are an issue going back to Security Update 2006-007 (#2), and prescribes editing the /etc/hostconfig file to change AUTOMOUNT=YES to =NO.

Amazingly, it worked. My AD users can once again log in and have their home folders correctly mounted and available transparently. The side effects mentioned in the article are inconsequential to our environment, and, in fact, I may not turn the AUTOMOUNT back on for a while, if ever.

The fix took 45 minutes to change all our systems. The research took countless hours over many weeks, culminating in one hellacious night (been here since 6pm yesterday). Crossing all limbs nothing else rears up…

Good night,

David
New York, NY

[Dimarc67]

Thanks, Kirk, but what you describe, though possibly related, is different than the issue we’re experiencing. In fact, in researching this problem, I came across the article that you provided. Unfortunately, the solution offered there does not solve this issue. In fact, editing the AUTOMOUNTER as the article directs actually caused the very behavior that it was supposed to correct. (Go figure.)

David Marcus
New York, NY

[Dimarc67]

Hi, Oliver.

I built and support a network of 14 Intel iMacs bound to Active Directory on Windows Small Business Server 2003. All user accounts have their home folders redirected to SMB shares on the server, and for the last year, everything’s worked quite nicely…until 10.4.9. For any system I updated to 10.4.9, it caused the exact issue you’ve described. Yours is the first mention of this issue that I’ve found on the net over the last two weeks.

I, too, was able to discern the issue is with mounting the SMB share during login, but your information about the logs is more than I knew. Sounds like your describing an issue with the authentication credentials not being properly transmitted by the AutoMounter (assuming it’s that script that does this). Seems to me that OS-X has a history of various sorts of issues of this type with SMB shares..

My work-around for the time being was to re-image my affected systems back to a 10.4.8 image. The Rosetta/SMB printing issue that 10.4.9 is supposed to resolve isn’t critical here, so 10.4.8 is good enough for now. I’m very interested to hear anything else that’s been discovered about this, or if there’s anything I can test on my end to bring more information to light.

Thanks.

David Marcus
New York, NY

P.S.–Incidentally, all of our iMacs are also running Windows XP in Parallels, and all are joined to the domain with the user’s My Documents folders redirected to the same SMB share as their home folders. Along with Roaming Profiles, this means a user can log on to any station, Windows or Mac, and still have all of their files immediately available in the default folder. It’s really sweet.

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