Macs fail to network login on first attempt

[Juniorz]

Hello,

 

Have a classroom of 30 imacs running a mix of snowleopard and lion. we have a macserver which copies user info from our windows active directory as we are a predominetly a windows school. however a major issue we have is that we fail to login straight away. the screen will shake indicating wrong login information however this is not the case. most time it will take 5-10 attempts before we can login properly.

 

any ideas on what could be causing the issue? and a fix for it.

 

happy to explain more.

[ericdano]

Why not pair the Active Directory (Windows) with Open Directory (Mac) on the server end, and then use that? Thats what we do.

[sted]

make sure that all the macs use a windows dc as their time server as they seem to be very fussy about time when connected to ad

[jonnykewell1]

make sure that all the macs use a windows dc as their time server as they seem to be very fussy about time when connected to ad

 

I would second what @sted said. Had the same problem recently. make sure the windows server, the mac server and the clients are all pointing to the same time server. If it is out by just a couple of minutes it can cause headaches.

Edited May 27, 2014 by jonnykewell1

[Juniorz]

i double checked times on all servers and clients and all are synched to the same second and to the same server.

[seawolf]

I suspect the user is not waiting for the red dot (indicating connection to AD server) to go away before trying to login. If you are on a .local domain it can take a couple of minutes for the Mac to be "ready" for login when coming out of sleep mode or a reboot. On a non .local Domain this only takes a few seconds.

 

Otherwise, it may be that the user actually ISN'T typing the right login details the first 5 times (spaces in usernames are common cause); or, their network home location may be specified wrong in the AD profile.

 

If it's neither of those things, then you have a truly unique problem I've not seen before. Might be best to open console immediately after a sequence of failed login attempts where the user finally gets on. Search for the username in console and you should see logging associated with the failed attempts and it should indicate the reason.

[Jwzg]

I suspect the user is not waiting for the red dot (indicating connection to AD server) to go away before trying to login. If you are on a .local domain it can take a couple of minutes for the Mac to be "ready" for login when coming out of sleep mode or a reboot. On a non .local Domain this only takes a few seconds.

 

Otherwise, it may be that the user actually ISN'T typing the right login details the first 5 times (spaces in usernames are common cause); or, their network home location may be specified wrong in the AD profile.

 

If it's neither of those things, then you have a truly unique problem I've not seen before. Might be best to open console immediately after a sequence of failed login attempts where the user finally gets on. Search for the username in console and you should see logging associated with the failed attempts and it should indicate the reason.

 

X2 We have that same issue on our network due to a .local domain and we are not yet at a point where we can rebuild.