Got an imac with Snow Leopard OS which I want to join to AD

Have an imac with the OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard?) which I want to join to a Windows Server 2008Domain - having read a bit about trying to do this on the net I'm nervous and would love an idiots guide if there is one? I have the Directory Utility open and see that it has various things enabled (Local, LDAPv3, and BSD Flat Files and NIS) and Active Directory is not ticked (all these listed as version 6.0) am I right in thinking that I need to enable Active Directory to start or is this an Active Directory on the imac? I'm thinking I need to next go to Utilities next but from there I'm at sea??

Yup, enable Active Directory in the utility. It'll then let you bind it to the AD with your username and password, and it'll appear in your AD structure. Make sure the clock is synced to the same timesource as your Windows servers to ease things a bit ;)

Thanks 3s-gtech,

Followed your guide and low and behold the imac has popped up in AD. Bringing up internet pages seems to have slown to a crawl now though.


For my next question I'm wondering what I need to put in the logon box after a restart to actually get on the network would it be \\domain\user

Hi

Just your name and password will do. Was internet a crawl prior to you joining the domain? Would this be with Safari by any chance? Have you tried browsing with Firefox instead?

Antonio Rocco (ACSA)

A big problem we ran into with Snow Leopard was that we had to set the time server to our domain time server under the Date & Time settings. It was driving me crazy.

I found that the Apple time server online was several minutes off our intranet time server (which is right? Probably Apple's but not a big deal), meaning that Kerberos was denying logins from the AD box to the Macs. The AD authentication shouldn't affect the speed Safari is browsing at though - it's not my favourite browser but it works okay here.