Question mark in dock

[Sheridan]

Ok, another day and another problem - this one is probably a definitive one as I'm sooo close to changing this macs to Windows 7!

 

I've imaged and configured 15 macs - all were working fine for Staff and Student logins - apart from the errors etc. I've rebuilt OD and recreated all of the preferences from scratch and it all seemed to work.

 

Testing some today and they now all show the question mark in the dock for the users home - and it is also missing in Finder! I set the Authenticated users on the root share folder years ago when we had this issue with 10.6 and that sorted it - but it seems to have come back overnight and theres been no changes to the AD servers, permissions,preferences etc!

 

I just need one more frustration like this to give up on osx, anyone got any ideas?

[3s-gtech]

Wait, this is 10.9 right? Be very, very careful with users' home directories: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/140307-magic-triangle-mavericks-destroying-windows-permissions.html

[Sheridan]

Odd thing is - it was working fine. Macs have always done stupid thing with windows permission anyway.

 

Does it work with 10.7 ok? Otherwise these macs are going down the windows route!

Edited August 22, 2014 by Sheridan

[Sheridan]

Ok, so from what I can see 10.9.2 and 10.9.4 are pretty busted up as far as the AD/OD thing is. If I set the options to make the AD a Mobile Account then the user sees their home folder in the dock, if I take that off it becomes a question mark again. What a mess of an os this is turning out to be!

 

I've now got to choose between Windows 7 or 10.6.8 which worked fine for years!

[3s-gtech]

Mountain Lion is rock solid IME, as is Snow Leopard but it's a bit old. Only issues with ML is cost - it's not a free upgrade.

[Sheridan]

I tested 10.7 but it wouldn't work with the OD bindings, i.e it never picked up the computer preferences. Only 10.6.8 and 10.9.2/4 worked, but 10.9 is unusable in anything other than a home or mac only environment.

[3s-gtech]

Yeah Lion/10.7 is a dog.

[Sheridan]

That means I'm stuck with 10.6.8 really - nice one apple!

[3s-gtech]

Is 10.8 not an option at all?

[Sheridan]

Not unless I pay for it! And I'm not in the position to to that right now. And I'm not inclined to either seeing as every version of osx from 10.7 has been a mess when joined to ad and od!

 

I'm seriously sick of apple today - rebuilding the image to 10.6.8 now gives me an invalid serial number for Logic Pro - time to start throwing macs out of the window!

Edited August 22, 2014 by Sheridan

[3s-gtech]

They do fly well, I guess the aluminium of the unibody is aerospace grade. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

[Arthur]

time to start throwing macs out of the window!

It is worth trying the latest public beta of OS X Yosemite just to see if that's any better?

[Lewys]

Are you using DFS at all?

[Sheridan]

Not using DFS, just connecting users to their SMB shares. To be honest I'm running out of time with this and I have little faith in newer versions providing anything other than another set of bugs.

 

So far, my test install of 10.7.5 is working well - connecting SMB shares and pulling down the preferences properly - but until I deploy a few more I'll reserve judgement.

[Sheridan]

Update: 10.7.5 deployed and working fine - I'll leave 10.9 for the home users!

 

Also I've tried Yosemite, and it seems to have the same issues as 10.9 so far. SMB shares not connecting, preferences not applied correctly etc. But shiny new IOS style icons. Great stuff

Edited August 27, 2014 by Sheridan

[Quackers]

Hmm, we run 10.9.4 here and its connecting the users home directory fine. We force local home directory then i made a script to redirect the main folders like documents to the users home drive on our Windows servers.

[3s-gtech]

We force local home directory then i made a script to redirect the main folders like documents to the users home drive on our Windows servers.

 

That's why it works. I think the problems come from using a Windows/NTFS based home directory.

[Sheridan]

I'll give the scripts a go if anyone would like to share them

 

Obviously the problem with the AD home directory is main issue, but we do notice that preferences aren't fully applied (Finder settings for example, and user desktop background) 10.9 also seems to run very 'laggy' but I'm guessing that is also down to the broken ad/od/smb implementation as the same settings work reliably in 10.6.8/10.7.5 (haven't tried 10.8 at all)

[Arthur]

SMB shares not connecting

Potential fix for SMB issue?

 

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=27480583#p27480583

 

If I try to connect to a share on my Windows server, it either won't connect at all, take 5 minutes to show the contents of a share or show the contents and lock up the finder if I try to access anything.

 

If I instead connect to the share like this...

smb://192.168.1.2:139 (instead of smb://192.168.1.2 which assumes port 445) then the share connects perfectly like it did in Mountain Lion. This is SMB over NetBIOS instead of SMB direct over TCP/IP.

Edited August 30, 2014 by Arthur