I used authconfig to change to ldap authentication, no customisation of nsswitch or pam.d files. If the mac based user has a crypt password there are no problems authenticating or changing the crypt password stored in the LDAP records.
When a user is changed to OD using WGM they enter their password on the admins WGM and can authenticate on the linux clients no problems. We just can’t change the OD password using the linux client.
Also used authconfig to set client authentication to kerberos but users couldn’t log into the client anymore. We don’t explicitly use kerberos so there could be any number of reasons why this fails, we don’t want to use kerberos we just thought this may provide an alternate route to the OD password server since kerberos is running on the OD server mac.
Thanks for your reply.