Mac AD issues -slow logon

[PeteM]

Hi
Our setup is as follows for 20 PowerMac G4's (recently upgraded to 10.5.8) in school on a Child Domain.

These Macs were bound to pre-created computer accounts in AD on our Server 2003 domain. We have mapped the users' home directories and set the proxy settings etc etc & everything was working fine.

In the last 2 weeks users are now either not logging on (it takes 2 or 3 attempts for the Mac to accept their authentication details - you get the shaky login window once or twice) and/or it can take up to 3-4 minutes for the Mac to logon. When the user is logged on everything is fine. If I log on locally as the Mac local admin account it is equally slow.

The only thing that has changed recently is that our domain forest has had it's functionality level raised.
Our Domain Controllers (for our child domain) have now been demoted to member servers and the Council have replaced them with 2 virtual DC's (We had no choice in this). Our member servers have retained DHCP & Print server functionality but AD and DNS etc have been moved to the virtual DC's. Despite reconfiguring the Macs so that they have the updated DNS entries added to their Network Settings logon time is still poor. FWIW we have not had any issues with our Windows PCs after these changes.

As an experiment on 1 Mac we deleted it's AD account, recreated a different one and then went thru the process of renaming the Mac and rebinding it. That didn't fix things.

In addition we have tried various suggestions such as deleting the kerberos realm information files using the rm Kerberos command and restarted the Directory service using the killall DirectoryService command. This didn't make any difference.

The Mac were upgraded from 10.4(Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard) in July and the Macs were fine after the upgrade. This leads me to think that it is either something to do with the further upgrade to 10.5.8 or something to do with the changes to our Domain structure.

So at the moment we are left with a suite of Macs that used to be really nippy at logging on and for reasons unknown are now problematic at logon which is making life tricky for our users and my blood pressure. Any advice would be gratefully received before my Technician's head explodes.

Thanks
Pete

[IT_Master]

To be honest, what you should have done FIRST is to upgrade one mac to 10.5 and another to 10.5.8. Then you will know what is really the issue. The server to me is fine. The macs are the ones I would mess with first. Downgrade one of the macs to find the culprit.

Good luck!

[PeteM]

To be honest, what you should have done FIRST is to upgrade one mac to 10.5 and another to 10.5.8. Then you will know what is really the issue. The server to me is fine. The macs are the ones I would mess with first. Downgrade one of the macs to find the culprit.

Good luck!

Hindsight is great tho & these are the first Macs we've ever had in school. Anyhow as of this morning we've got them working & logging on as they should now