Last semester we had a lot of problems in the lab. Our main problems were due to two things: the migration to Tiger, and problems with our home account server. Our Tiger problems have largely gone away with the latest releases, and we've replaced our home account server with another machine, and, aside from a minor hiccup here and there, things seem to have quieted down. The Macs are running well, and there hasn't been a server disconnect in some time. It's damn nice.
There has been one fairly minor lingering problem, however. For some reason our workstation Macs occasionally and randomly lose their connection to our authentication server — our Mac Server. When this happens, the most notable and problematic symptom is users' inability to log in. Any attempt at login is greeted with the login screen shuffle. You know, that thing where the login window shakes violently at the failed login attempt. This behavior is an indication that the system does not recognize either the user name or the password supplied, which makes sense, because when the binding to the authentication server is broken, for all intents and purposes, the user no longer exists on that system.
I've looked long and hard to find a reason for, and a solution to this problem. I have yet to discover what causes the systems to become unbound from the server (though I'm starting to suspect some DNS funkiness, or anomalies in my LDAP database as the root cause at this point). There is no pattern to it, and there is nothing helpful in the logs. Only a message that the machine is unable to bind to the server — if it happens at boot; nothing about why, and nothing if it happens while the machine is on, which it sometimes does. It's a mystery. And until recently, the only fix I could come up with was to log on to the unbound machine and reset the server in the Directory Access application. Part of my research involved looking for a command-line way to do this so that I wouldn't have to log in and use the GUI every time this happened, as it happens fairly often, and the GUI method is slow and cumbersome, especially when you want to get that machine back online ASAP.
It took me a while, but I have found the magic command, at a site called MacHacks. Boy is it simple. You just have to restart DirectoryService:
sudo killall DirectoryServiceThis forces the computer to reload all the services listed in the Directory Access app, and rebind to any servers that have been set up for authentication. I've added the command to the crontab and set it to run every 30 minutes. That should alleviate the last of our lab problems.
Hopefully the rest of this semester will be as smooth sailing as the past two weeks. I could use a little less systems related drama right now.