[firehaus]

I have begun to experience either a related issue or the identical issue since late March. I implemented your suggestions for “Steps taken to prevent the crash” as they seemed reasonable. I’ll post back any update or future solution if I figure out anything new. My hardware is a little different and I have other related systems that are also causing this issue to occur.

Mac OS X 10.5.6
Xserve dual G4 1GHz 2GB RAM
OD Master + AFP shares
HFS+ file system on internal RAID 1

Mac OS X 10.5.6
Xserve Quad Xeon 3GHz 16GB RAM
Mail related services only
HFS+ file system on internal RAID 5

When we reach ~40+ AFP users during biz hours about half or more are disconnected. There are only 2-3 SMB users at most.
Typically it appears to be our mail server that instigates the issue. Mail delivery is held up because of the error since users can’t be authenticated to access their accounts.

Downtime for the AFP share is usually less than 4-5 minutes but downtime for the mail server can be as high as 15-20 minutes as we have a large message store, plus a large 1.7TB RAID 5 that has to be initialized.

[firehaus]

I realize you may have resolved this issue but I want to post my solution as it may help others and/or generate further ideas.

You DO NOT need to set up the “Directory Service” part found in the FM Pro server admin as this is not what links it to Directory Access. First make sure your firewall, if active on your FM Pro server, has the necessary ports open. Launch the Directory Access application from the Applications -> Utilities folder or from Server Admin. Once this is configured then accounts can be authenticated.

Following are the directions from Apple for setting up Directory Access should resolve the issue.

Some of the relevant docs:

[url]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=ServerAdmin/10.4/en/c5od9.html[/url]

[url]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=ServerAdmin/10.4/en/c7od24.html[/url]

In my experience always enter the LDAP/OD server using its IP address. Do not use its FQDN. Leave the server settings as-is and do not try and figure them out yourself (if you are authenticating against a Mac OS X Server).

Also in some instances the various db files that store your connection info don’t refresh as the changes are saved. More than once an Apple Systems Engineer has told me to restart my FM Pro server to initialize the changes. In one extreme case then told me to delete ALL the directory access info so nothing was entered, restart, then put in the correct settings, and then restart again to get everything working (which it did).

I hope this helps. Both Apple and Filemaker make this set up sound really easy and it is as long as you know your network inside and out, it doesn’t work so well if you didn’t set up the LDAP/OD yourself or the network authentication settings aren’t properly documented.

Good luck.

[Author]

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