iMac & bluescreen issues

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14th January 2009, 06:11 PM
Marci

iMac & bluescreen issues

Wotcha folks - am having issues with a pile of iMacs and wondered if any of you could shed some light.

We have 16x iMac 20", 4Gb Ram, 250Gb Hitachi HDDs, Core2Duo 2.6Ghz (iirc) and an X-Server.

The iMacs are authenticated to ActiveDirectory, with accounts managed by the X-Server. When users logon, OSX creates a local folder structure for each user (based on the template I created, which is nothing special). It also maps their Windows roaming home folder, and any necessary shares of our Win2k3 servers.

So far, I've had to reinstall at least 5x of these iMacs as they bluescreen on poweron, at random, for no apparent reason.

Single User mode > fsck -fy makes little difference (altho does repair a pile of fs issues apparently succesfully) - generally leaves me at the spinning bootup logo after it's been run rather than bluescreen, but will go no further. Only solution is to redo a Netinstall off the X-Server.

At the moment we're considering splitting them from AD to see if that resolves the issue, but that knackers up multi-purpose useage by other departments (these are in the Music Dept, running Garageband and Cubase 4).

I've also disabled all power management as have spotted posts on other forums regarding bluescreening being related to waking from sleep mode.

Has anyone else experienced a similar issue with these latest iMacs under similar circumstances?

I can't go 48 hrs before there's another one that needs sorting at the moment...
15th January 2009, 10:52 AM
Marci

Delving deeper into the problem on 2 of the iMacs... if I fire up in verbose, I get bombarded with the following:

DirectoryService[51]: Active Directory may be unreliable because Kerberos file is not managed by the system

This just repeats down the screen whilst the kernel-loading logo is displayed on screen. This is on a Mac that had got to the bluescreen issue, had fsck -fy run on it, and this is what it now does.
17th January 2009, 09:37 PM
AntonioRocco

Presumably you built one of the iMacs, imaged it and built the nbi to be pushed out by the NetBoot Service?

The error log may refer to the LKDC being the same? Essentially all the iMacs think they are being authenticated to themselves locally using the same Local Key Distribution Centre. This is in addition to and separate from AD's KDC.

The 10.5.6 Combo Update (Server) is supposed to fix this. Apple have posted a kbase article with more information.

Mac OS X 10.5: Duplicate computer name alert when binding to Open Directory

Normally in an OD environment with no AD you'd get the error message as explained in the article. With AD in the mix the problem may be compounded? Could be why you see the blue screen?

The System Imaging section of this article explains more:

About the Mac OS X Server 10.5.6 Update

If connectivity is via ethernet (presumably it is) make sure you disable IPv6.

Antonio Rocco (ACSA)
19th January 2009, 10:18 AM
Marci

Quote:

Originally Posted by AntonioRocco

Presumably you built one of the iMacs, imaged it and built the nbi to be pushed out by the NetBoot Service?

Yep - ages ago. The image only sets up OD... once the image has been succesfully installed to a client I manually set up all the AD stuff after applying all OSX updates etc.
10th February 2009, 02:45 PM
Marci

Quote:

I've also disabled all power management as have spotted posts on other forums regarding bluescreening being related to waking from sleep mode.

This turned out to be the cause... stopped the X-Serve from handling their power management and no more bluescreens / corrupt drives.