10.7 and Active Directory .local domain

[jasetech]

Hi all,

We have been battling this situation for a long time now without any positive results, and I am hoping that someone may have some suggestions that may help.

Our school district uses a .local AD domain, and our Macs which are on 10.7 have difficulties in logging into. The problem is the 'Network accounts are unavailable' dialog that displays on the login screen. In a lab of 30 computers, all will show this message for a minute or two, and then some will let you log in, and others will continue displaying this message. If you restart the computers, the same will happen but on different computers; It is never consistent which will have the problems.

Based on the research I have done, a lot of .local domains appear to have issues with Lion, and Apple has released numerous updates to try and help it. Binding to the domain has no issue, and the increased log in time is annoying but is acceptable.

• We have ensured that a preferred domain sever is selected
• Issue persists after a clean install and ensured all updates have been applied (10.7.4)
• Logging into a local account and using fast user switching seems to allow a network log in quicker
• We are debating disabling Bonjour, but are holding off unless a better solution can be found.

Has anyone experienced this issue and has implemented a solution that you could recommend?

Thank you!

[JR-PCS]

Personally when I have setup macs in .local domains (and I have seen quite a few), I have found 10.7.3 and above to resolve the issues. However if this is not working for you have you tried reading this?

I have sometimes seen issues where IPv6 entries would constantly disappear out of DNS so sometimes I would just put the IPv6 info in the hosts file and push the modified hosts file to all macs.