Errors Regarding Unavailable Home Directories

I was having some trouble with a large Open Directory installation recently – users were able to authenticate, but never saw their desktop – they got a "you are unable to log in at this time…" error instead, then were logged back out.

After some googling, I found a story on macosxhints.com’s discussion boards about bad aliases in /Volumes. I checked /Volumes on my server, and sure enough, though the Homes mount record pointed to /Volumes/ServerRAID, the homes were actually at /Volumes/ServerRAID 1 (note the 1!).

What had happened was simple but had pretty bad side effects – I had found that the admin previous to me had set two of the Xserve’s drive modules to fucntion as a striped RAID (!) – very bad for user data – I had cloned the drive (with bombich.com CCC) to an external firewire disk, then changed the RAID to a mirrored one, cloned from the firewire to the RAID, then removed the firewire disk.

The problem with this was that CCC also clones the volume name – you see on your desktop two disks with the same name, but Darwin needs to differentiate between disks – hence adding the "1". Unplugging a firewire disk unmounted it, but didn’t remove the alias (ServerRAID) to it in /Volumes. The new RAID continued to be called "ServerRAID 1" – and that, of course, confused clients looking to automount a home in /Volumes/ServerRAID – which no longer existed.

It’s not easy (possible?) to rename an alias, so I waited till the server could be shut down, booted down, removed the RAID drive modules, booted in single user mode (fsck’ed the disk to be safe) – checked /Volumes and deleted any stray alias files, shut down again (shutdown -h now), reinserted the RAID modules, booted, and all was immediately well with user logins.

So, keep an eye on /Volumes if you have Home Dir troubles. (Anyone know a way to make the Finder display all the unix stuff?)

(ed. note. "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles ON" will show all files in the Finder and you can always use the "Go To Folder…" command to navigate to hidden folders. You might also want to check /private/var/automount/Network/Servers –pre 10.3.5– or /private/Network –10.3.5 on– on the client side for network home folder issues.)

bcirvin/

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OS X Server Add User Script

Quick script that will allow you to add a user from the Command Line

Get the script from the Downloads section.

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CDPR – Cisco Discovery Protocol

Are you on a Cisco Network – and need to know just what switch and port you are on?

try the cdpr tool –

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[ANN] MacEnterprise.org \”FileWave\” WebCast

The MacEnterprise.org (formerly MacOSXLabs.org) group will be presenting a “FileWave” WebCast on Tuesday, August 17 at 1:00 pm EDT. Ben Forsyth, Head of Development and Technology at FileWave (USA), Inc., will be presenting “FileWave” – a powerful software deployment and management solution, and “Asset Trustee”, a hardware and software gathering and reporting solution.

For the case study we have Brent Hayward, the Information Systems Manager for the Urbandale Community School District in Urbandale, Iowa presenting how he manages a Mac OS X deployment seamlessly using FileWave to distribute/upgrade system or application software to any computer without user intervention.

For more information on how to watch this WebCast, please visit the MacEnterprise.org webcast web page.

– Justin Elliott
macenterprise.org WebCast Coordinator & Co-Chair

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AFP548 Crusies Past 100,000 Hits in Only 20 Days

In the wee hours of the morning today the new AFP548.com passed the 100,000 hit mark. That’s 100,000 hits from over 14,000 unique visitors on the 20th day since the redesign.

Thanks!
The AFP548.com staff

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Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.3.5 and Mac OS X Server 10.3.5

Apple has released Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 10.3.5. Read on for more info…

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Cyrus Squatter for OS X Server

Squatter indexes Cyrus mailboxes for faster searching

The version Apple includes in OS X Server is a bit busted so download it here.

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Using Entourage 2004 for Exchange Connectivity

Sick of being stuck with Outlook 2001? Then Entourage 2004 might be a way out of Classic mode. I’ll even tell you how to convert those nasty .pst and .pab files. Two for one in the third party app department today! (Updated 8/11/2004)

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Procmail on Panther Server

For those of us who either don’t want to use sieve, or haven’t been able to make it work properly–despite Mr. Rennich’s best efforts to help–setting up procmail filtering is not too difficult.

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Asterisk on MacOSX with Aqua GUI tools

We have made an OSX build of Asterisk, the open source PBX and telephony server available as an OSX install package.

We are also developing Cocoa based GUI tools for configuration and management of Asterisk on MacOSX. A pre-release of the first GUI tool is now available.

For more information and download links check out the Asterisk Wiki …

here, here, and here.

All open source under the GPL!

rgds
benjk

Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd.

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