[deviantflux]

I am in charge of a network of roughly 40 emacs & imacs on a network, set to pull their user lists and respective users' home folders from a OS X Server machine. Occasionally, some computers will refuse to load a user's home folder. Is it likely a network or a system issue that is preventing these client computers from retrieving the home folders for these users. Client and server are running OS 10.3.7, with the server running the Server variety, of course.

Can anyone shed some light on this problem?

Thanks so much in advance.

[Detrius]

So, do you mean that the user is properly authenticated, the login windows goes away, and then you get the message saying the home directory could not be found?

[mrcorwin]

I too run into this same problem! (10.3.X on the clients and 10.2 server updated with the latest everything) The clients say the home directory could not be found.

[kennedy]

I also experience this. Particularly the first person to login after the machine has been dozing... I think the AFS connection gets "stale" or something such that it doesn't mount the disk... OR maybe it starts with the old mount, so doesn't bother to remount, but then it realizes the mount is stale and removes it... leaving you with no User dir mounted.

Logging out and then logging back in fixes the problem most of the time.
Sometimes, a restart is necessary... and that always fixes it.


I'd love to see that ugly behavior fixed.

[deviantflux]

Detrius, yes the user is properly authenticated. The login window goes away and the user is logged in as usual; however, a dialog box appears saying that the home folder could not be found. The home directories for all these users are contained on a networked drive, and even when this drive is manually mounted, the home directories cannot be located despite logging in and then out again. What is truly puzzling is that other users on the network are able to pull up their home directories just fine. I have noticed though that this issue has coincided with extremely long login times for various users (not only the ones who are missing their home directory).

Thanks everyone for reading my post sharing your experiences. I will be contacting out apple technician for the school distrct so that we can at least shed some light on this issue.

glad to know i am not the only one experiencing this problem though.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by deviantflux:
The home directories for all these users are contained on a networked drive, and even when this drive is manually mounted, the home directories cannot be located despite logging in and then out again. What is truly puzzling is that other users on the network are able to pull up their home directories just fine.

Interesting... have you tried restarting ONLY the client Mac (the Mac that the person is logging into) to see if that clears it up. That always clears it up for me... and is, at least, a not-too-painful workaround... though a bit embarrassing being the resident Mac zealot.

[deviantflux]

heh, restarting the offending client computer used to be the solution of choice. lately; however, restarting the client computer hasn't done a thing. i have encountered the problem before, but it would usually clear itself up over a matter of hours, or a day, after being restarted a couple of times. the same client computers have been exhibiting this behavior for over a week now at this point.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by deviantflux:
heh, restarting the offending client computer used to be the solution of choice. lately; however, restarting the client computer hasn't done a thing. i have encountered the problem before, but it would usually clear itself up over a matter of hours, or a day, after being restarted a couple of times. the same client computers have been exhibiting this behavior for over a week now at this point.

In that week, have you restarted OS X Server machine?
Once ... just once ... I started having a few that would not work at all... restarting the OS X Server machine remedied it. (FWIW, I usually only restart the OS X Server machine when required to by a software update... and I only do those rarely... 10.3.7 is the only update I have done since installing Panther when 10.3.3 came out and proved stable.)

I know, I'm not helping really... mostly I'm just saying "me too"... I would love to identify the problem and get it fixed! Hopefully someone who knows will pipe in...

[Detrius]

I have had the same problem before in the past, and I know I fixed it... I just don't recall how off the top of my head.

Things to start with... on the machines that are having problems, create a local account. Turn on remote login. Before attempting to log in as a network user, log in as the local user and then:

tail -f /var/log/system.log

Also, do the same on the server.

Then, log in as the network user and see what happens. If nothing jumps out at you, post it up here.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by deviantflux:
...and even when this drive is manually mounted, the home directories cannot be located despite logging in and then out again...

I don't recall this helping any.

One thing to remember is that if the home directory is shared via AFP, you can't do fast user switching with network users. You have to use NFS for this... but then you have the other problems that come with NFS. Since I only run servers on private networks with trusted people using the clients, I use NFS. In any open network with untrusted users, this would not be advisable.

[deviantflux]

i attempted the tail command in the above post, but still nothing. here is the output from the terminal after i ran it from a remote computer while logging in with a networked user on the client computer


Jan 31 14:03:30 Barth-01 kernel: ApplePMUUserClient::setProperties WakeOnACchange 0
Jan 31 14:03:33 Barth-01 /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent: ********Launched Agent********
Jan 31 14:03:33 Barth-01 /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/AppleVNCServer.bundle/Contents/MacOS/AppleVNCServer: ***START RFBSERVER
Jan 31 14:03:59 Barth-01 xinetd[4916]: service ssh, IPV6_ADDRFORM setsockopt() failed: Protocol not available (errno = 42)
Jan 31 14:03:59 Barth-01 xinetd[4916]: START: ssh pid=5356 from=192.168.4.136
Jan 31 14:04:13 Barth-01 sshd[5356]: Accepted password for amanda from 192.168.4.136 port 50352 ssh2
Jan 31 14:13:26 Barth-01 kernel: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /private/Network/Servers/andersen-x-srv/HOME, pid 5344
Jan 31 14:13:26 Barth-01 loginwindow[5344]: Login of user "BrownA" NOT recorded in /var/log/lastlog because UID (2009000008) is greater than 100000
Jan 31 14:13:26 Barth-01 /System/Library/LoginPlugins/MCX.loginPlugin/Contents/MacOS/MCXCompositor: MCX.CompositorarseOneArgument() : Unable to access user's home directory "/Network/Servers/andersen-x-srv/HOME/BrownA". Set-once prefs will not be composited.
Jan 31 14:13:56 Barth-01 loginwindow[5344]: Failed to stat homedir: sleeping 1 second: chdir returns -1 for /Network/Servers/andersen-x-srv/HOME/BrownA: Attempt 1
Jan 31 14:13:57 Barth-01 loginwindow[5344]: Failed to stat homedir: sleeping 1 second: chdir returns -1 for /Network/Servers/andersen-x-srv/HOME/BrownA: Attempt 2
Jan 31 14:13:58 Barth-01 loginwindow[5344]: Failed to stat homedir: sleeping 1 second: chdir returns -1 for /Network/Servers/andersen-x-srv/HOME/BrownA: Attempt 3

it continues to try and mount the home directory 17 more times... and still fails eventually

thanks for your help so far

[deviantflux]

not that this will probably help much, but i hope that any info will be slightly helpful.

when i remote login to the client missing home folders as a user who is missing their home dir, i get this message

Could not chdir to home directory /Network/Servers/school-x-srv/HOME/user: No such file or directory

i guess this is the same as that dialog that pops up when i log in...

[JLL]

Have tried to clear the MCX cache on the client machine?

[deviantflux]

after scouring the internet and the apple support lists, i came across someone saying to kill the directory services.

I enabled the root account on the offending computers, and simply went into the terminal and did KillAll DirectoryService...

upon logging in with the offending account, the home folder was found.

hopefully everything will work for the time being. tomorrow may yet bring bad news.

[Detrius]

One thing to note is that you have an error message in there about having a UID higher than 100000. This may be something you want to look into, as the last log can be very useful.

[ThisGuy]

i came across this and figured i would share it here:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...ed.2@.689f026b

[deviantflux]

heh, it has come back to haunt me again. those machines that it worked previously, today failed to find their home folders.

the fix linked to above didn't work either unfortunately, I also tried adding DirectoryServices to the startup plist... but to no avail.

thanks to everyone for their help and aid thusfar

[Oneota]

One thing you might try is starting the machine in Single User mode (hold Command-S while powering up), and then mount the drive read-write by typing "mount -uw /" and then typing 'rm -rf /var/automount/Network/Servers'.

Sometimes if a statically-mounted AFP server gets disconnected, the client will create files on the local drive at the mountpoint, which can interfere with future connections to the AFP volume. I've cleared this up numerous times with the above commands.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by Oneota:
One thing you might try is starting the machine in Single User mode (hold Command-S while powering up), and then mount the drive read-write by typing "mount -uw /" and then typing 'rm -rf /var/automount/Network/Servers'.

Sometimes if a statically-mounted AFP server gets disconnected, the client will create files on the local drive at the mountpoint, which can interfere with future connections to the AFP volume. I've cleared this up numerous times with the above commands.

This is an issue I began having a lot with 10.3.7. There are files located in /Network and /automount. I have nothing automount related in /var or /private.

[deviantflux]

that fix suggested by oneota has worked so far, hopefully upgrading to 10.3.8 will get rid of the problem completely. As far as I can tell, this home folder issue, while occuring before 10.3.7, did get worse once we upgraded to 10.3.7

[kennedy]

Originally posted by deviantflux:
that fix suggested by oneota has worked so far, hopefully upgrading to 10.3.8 will get rid of the problem completely. As far as I can tell, this home folder issue, while occuring before 10.3.7, did get worse once we upgraded to 10.3.7

I suspect that's coincidence as I have had less of that under 10.3.7, if any difference at all.