network account unavailable

[kiwiuk_927]

Morning,

I am after a bit of advice please. I have a group of macs which are on a AD domain all connected with winbind. 20 of the macs at working fine on the domain, however I have 2 macs which will not let people login to the domain. It says network account unavailable. When you login to the macs ever all the settings look the same as a mac next door which is working fine. You can ping the gateway and also browse the internet.

 

Any suggestions would to start looking to resolve this would be welcome

 

Thanks

Kiwi

[sted]

check the time on the mac is as close as possible to the time on your dcs (id be tempted to set the macs to get their time from a dcs ip address)

[bald_pig]

Have you tried to rebind?

[dhicks]

id be tempted to set the macs to get their time from a dcs ip address

 

For some reason, that doesn't seem to work on our Macs - I haven't tracked down the root cause of the issue yet, but you'd certainly think just setting the Mac to pick up time from the Domain Controller would keep the time properly in sync.

[bald_pig]

For some reason, that doesn't seem to work on our Macs - I haven't tracked down the root cause of the issue yet, but you'd certainly think just setting the Mac to pick up time from the Domain Controller would keep the time properly in sync.

 

IIRC, DC's don't use NTP to distribute time to domain machines, you have to add it separately.

[dhicks]

IIRC, DC's don't use NTP to distribute time to domain machines, you have to add it separately.

 

Crikey - so you mean the Windows Time service running on our domain controllers is some sort of Microsoft-specific time service, not standard-NTP compatible?

[jtotheb]

For some reason, that doesn't seem to work on our Macs - I haven't tracked down the root cause of the issue yet, but you'd certainly think just setting the Mac to pick up time from the Domain Controller would keep the time properly in sync.

 

In the Date and Time system preferences putting in your PDC's IP address and having "set date and time automatically" ticked should cause it to sync. Any firewall rules or ACLs affecting traffic from the Macs?

 

IIRC, DC's don't use NTP to distribute time to domain machines, you have to add it separately.

 

You don't normally explicitly add it for Windows domain clients, but I've had to put the IP address in explicitly for domain joined Macs to prevent their clocks slipping and for other non-Windows devices that I've wanted to sync to the PDC's clock.

[LTurner3692]

I had this problem, still to this day never found out why i had it! i tried setting time with DC, time with the Mac that had the server app, i tried having the Mac with server app down with the imacs, had it in the server room, had it all on the same switch, everything i could think off! always had 1 or two with red dots or network accounts unavailable.

 

Would love to find out how other people got it to work!

[bald_pig]

Crikey - so you mean the Windows Time service running on our domain controllers is some sort of Microsoft-specific time service, not standard-NTP compatible?

 

Having had a look, recent technet articles say it is NTP, so either I was mistaken or it has changed!

[DGardiner]

Dont you have t ojump through hoops to setup NTP on windows server https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/816042/how-to-configure-an-authoritative-time-server-in-windows-server

 

 

isnt there also a dhcp option to set where the ntp server is?

Edited January 24, 2019 by DGardiner

[theeggmaster]

Dont you have t ojump through hoops to setup NTP on windows server https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/816042/how-to-configure-an-authoritative-time-server-in-windows-server

 

 

isnt there also a dhcp option to set where the ntp server is?

 

I used the Microsoft Easy Fix download on the link you shared when I was setting ours up. Worked really well and easily.

[round2it]

Main issue we have had is with dns for macs it has to be 100% working

 

i have our macs on static ip addresses well reserved in dhcp ensure the time is correct on the mac and the DC

 

sometimes a rebind to ad fixes issues like you are seeing.

[dhicks]

you'd certainly think just setting the Mac to pick up time from the Domain Controller would keep the time properly in sync.

 

Hmm - just thought, I wonder if adding a cronjob as the root user to run every hour or so to sync the time against a DC via a command line would work?

[Zoatibix]

I had a bunch of older iMacs running ElCap. We had to upgrade to High Sierra to run some particular software in those classrooms.

 

That broke their ability to get network time. Reading into the topic, I believe that Apple disabled the old NTPD service and created Pacemaker (I think in Sierra?).

 

Mojave machines use Timed instead of Pacemaker and have had no issue at all.

 

For the High Sierra machines I fixed it by following a suggestion to set the file controlling NTPD on start up to 'enabled' and putting it back into the startup files.

 

Previously we had issues with networked Macs losing time if they go to sleep.

[dhicks]

Mojave machines use Timed instead of Pacemaker and have had no issue at all.

 

My workstation and the IT room are Macs, I've upgraded mine to Mojave already and found it's fixed another issue (mounting of Windows file shares), so I reckon the first step is to upgrade the IT room machines to Mojave and go from there.