About to throw macs through the window!

[GoldenWonder]

We've got a room of 10 macs, connect to AD and an XServe. They authenticate to the XServe for machine policy and use policy and the AD server for user authentication.

 

All works fine, users login, get their policy etc and so on.

 

However, the damn things 'hang' worse than Windows 95 machines! Everything I do results in the stupid spinning wheel - and after several minutes waiting I just pull the plug and reboot. Could be anything, viewing a document, printing an image, surfing the web - just randomly hangs.

 

I can't believe this is normal behaviour - they're practically unusable in this state.

 

I've also noticed it takes a long time for the users 'Home' and 'My Applications' icons in the dock to actually do anything. It takes several minutes after the desktop has appeared for them to be 'active' (i.e they open up when clicked)

 

Any ideas as to where I'm going wrong with this? They're on our network and the authentication side seems to work ok? (apart from it usually takes 2-3 attempts to logon as a network user if the mac has gone to sleep)

 

Very frustrating!

[Marci]

Something definitely wrong there, but far more detail required...

 

What version of OSX are the clients running?

What version of OSXServer is the server running?

What version of AD Domain are you running?

How is your DNS set up across the network?

 

Apart from that, first thing I'd suggest is swipe one and move it into your office for a week so you can get your head round what's going on in comfortable surroundings.

[stevehp]

We have nearly the same issues. Macbooks joined in a magic triangle that will beachball on any little task you do. I have two carts with 30 laptops each. Nobody has complained about it yet, but I see it everytime I work on one.

 

The Macbooks are mid 2010 models running 10.6.3-10.6.5.

Xserve is running 10.6.5

The Windows side of things is all Windows Server 2003(for now). DNS is run off our DC.

 

I had a beachballer in my office for a day and went through log after log, setting after setting. The only thing I didn't do was wipe the drive and and not join it to OD or AD. I did rule out hardware failure as the Apple Diagnostics come back with no issues whatsoever.

Edited November 22, 2010 by stevehp

[GoldenWonder]

Same here, 2010 model 10.6.5 clients and 10.6.5 server - all bought at the same time. DNS is on our 2003/2008 Servers and works fine across everything else using AD (Windows and Linux PCs). The DNS servers are dished out by DHCP and the Macs are all getting IP addresses and DNS settings ok - resolution of addresses also is working ok.

 

I suspected Sophos as a culprit, but disabling that made no difference. I also wasn't sure whether I had the magic triangle set correctly. In the directory utility I set the client's search order to OD and then AD - any other way means the Mac clients don't pick up computer preferences. Seems to work fine though, AD clients can login and get their OD preferences and the Macs are getting their machine preferences.

 

Problem is when the damn beach ball appears, I can't start the process manager or a terminal window to see if anything is hogging the CPU!

 

It also seems to be highly random. It happens 30 seconds after login, or 5 minutes. It can be when using Finder, or any application or utility. Once its hung it may come back after 5 minutes or so, or sometimes is completely frozen!

 

Whats most frustrating is these are fairly fresh machines, not much on them and haven't been 'tinkered' with much at all! Apart from basic Office/Sophos/Photoshop installs they're as they came.

[HallX]

Hi guys

 

Are reverse DNS lookups working OK, I've found Mac's can get really grizzly if they arn't.

[GoldenWonder]

Forward and reverse lookups seem to be fine - resolving by IP or hostname works as expected.

[dayzd]

Seconded the reverse lookups.

 

I recently went on the Apple Directory Services course and our instructor told us that the three most common causes of problems with networked Macs are DNS, DNS and DNS. Macs require forward and reverse DNS lookups for all machines to work properly, otherwise things won't run smoothly.

 

The problem with integrating Macs into Windows environments is that Windows is far more forgiving towards bad DNS - it can cope a lot better without proper reverse DNS records. Drop a Mac in the equation though, and you're gonna have trouble.

[dayzd]

Forward and reverse lookups seem to be fine - resolving by IP or hostname works as expected.

 

Have you tried with the 'dig' command in terminal?

I don't remember the exact details why (possibly something to do with host files and hostname caches etc), but our instructor recommended we test with that.

 

dig hostname

- returns IP

dig -x 192.168.1.1

- returns hostname (in the 'ANSWER SECTION')

[Norphy]

We used to get similar problems to this. The senior engineer here couldn't work it out and got Toucan, our Mac suppliers/support guys in to have a look. After much scratching of heads and pouring over log files, it turns out that all of our macs were looking for a host called Barcelona and when they couldn't find it, they hung for ages and behaved pretty much how you describe up there.

 

The Toucan guy set up a cName called Barcelona in our DNS which pointed at our xServe and that particular problem vanished. I don't know if it'll work for you but it may be worth a try?

[HodgeHi]

Not only do you need to make sure that forward and reverse dns records are working correctly, you also need to make sure that forwarded dns queries are correct as well. I found that even though the forwarded address could resolve Internet names, when using it for our internal networked macs everything just seemed slow all the time. Changing the adress from our routers address to a proper forwarding dns server resolved our issue in an instant.

[stevehp]

I've been looking on an off at this issue for the past few days, and the only success I've had was to hardwire a Macbook up to a switch that is on the same vlan as our Xserve and the Windows servers. Once connected to it the beachball all but disappears. Things like iMovie that would sit and spin for ages either hardwired or wireless would open up and be ready in seconds when I plugged it into the switch. What that means, I really don't know. Edited December 1, 2010 by stevehp

[Marci]

To avoid anyone mucking up DNS records having an impact on the Macs, I imaged all ours with hosts files covering all the servers they'd need with all permutations of DNS and IP etc.

Not to say our DNS records get mucked up frequently, I'd just rather be safe than sorry...! (eg: If our DNS server goes down, Macs will continue to function regardless)

[HodgeHi]

Interesting way of doing things. Also when the hosts file needs updating you could push a new one out via ARD.

 

Also i don't know much about how VLANS work but it does sound like DNS isn't working as it should causing the issue you see. maybe a tcpdump on a client would reveal more?

[buzzard]

I'm liking the hosts file, I agree an interesting way of doing things... (starts doing a hosts file)

[Marci]

Would it upset folks dramatically if I told them that I've also done this for all our Windows machines too? All machines pick up a hosts file at startup that's dished out by our webserver. I can turn our DNS server off if I want and you don't really notice it, other than clients not being able to find other clients (and the 10 less critical servers that aren't in the hosts file), but they can always reach the main servers. If there's a change, I just update the hosts file on the webserver and it's picked up on next reboot.

 

Strictly speaking, this is generally frowned upon as an amateur fudge for not being arsed to sort DNS properly, however, if one knows ones DNS is 100% peachy, then it simply adds another level of redundancy to the system.

 

I've been doing it on the Macs since we got them, on OSX 10.5... but it would also partially explain why our 10.6 machines never seemed to suffer the AD binding issues that many other early adopters saw...

Edited December 2, 2010 by Marci

[Slartibartfast]

Do you have your home folders (including Library and other stuff - the Mac equivalent of Application Data) on an SMB (i.e Windows) network share? This is not advisable and can cause the problems you're having.

[HodgeHi]

This for me would be odd behaviour as Apple have given the option to choose SMB for networked home dirs unless this is solely for their own SMB implementation which IMO is rather poor.

[3s-gtech]

We have ours on a Windows share (same one as students' Windows Home folders) without these issues - in fact, performance is pretty good.

[Slartibartfast]

Apple don't recommend it, and a number of applications (including all Adobe CS applications) don't support it.

[3s-gtech]

Ah cheers - I'll remember that. I don't need much persuading to avoid Adobe CS!

[stevehp]

Yeah, our home folders are on a windows share via smb. When compared to a Windows PC be it wired or wireless the performance is rather poor. Clicking on the Apple menu on the left hand side results in a beachball, opening a finder window takes longer than usual, and just the act of opening iMovie takes on average about two minutes. I ran tcpdump but I couldn't read the output, anyone have a nice and easy way of deciphering it? Ping, dig, host all return correct information for forward and reverse queries.

 

Standalone Macs with local accounts work beautifully, but I'm not even going to suggest that we do that for sixty plus of them. This is a very frustrating issue, and I've had my fair share of them but this one takes the cake.

[HodgeHi]

To be honest creating local accounts not that hard on multiple machines. It can be scripted via terminal and using ARD can be done in less than a minute if the clients are configured for remote management. Once I got my head around how to create the local accounts I created the account on 32 machines in the time it took to run the script.

 

It's not the best solution but a workaround if you need one. Plus, macs run almost flawlessly when standalone / on a dedicated OD network.

 

But I feel your pain. We had a new suite installed when we moved to a new school. It took me around 4 weeks of the 6 week hols to find out why mine were acting in a similar way to yours. However we don't use VLANs.

 

Ours was a problem with the DNS forwarding the queries to the outside world. Windows and the web worked fine, however the macs just crashed. It was strange. As soon as I put in the correct forwarding address in the 2003 Server then the macs just sprung to life. No beach balls at all. Very odd.

 

You could tcpdump to a file and then upload to here. Might be able to help a little more.

 

You could also possibly tail the logs while logged in using ssh. This also helps to see what is happening.

[stevehp]

To be honest creating local accounts not that hard on multiple machines. It can be scripted via terminal and using ARD can be done in less than a minute if the clients are configured for remote management. Once I got my head around how to create the local accounts I created the account on 32 machines in the time it took to run the script.

 

It's not the best solution but a workaround if you need one. Plus, macs run almost flawlessly when standalone / on a dedicated OD network.

 

But I feel your pain. We had a new suite installed when we moved to a new school. It took me around 4 weeks of the 6 week hols to find out why mine were acting in a similar way to yours. However we don't use VLANs.

 

Ours was a problem with the DNS forwarding the queries to the outside world. Windows and the web worked fine, however the macs just crashed. It was strange. As soon as I put in the correct forwarding address in the 2003 Server then the macs just sprung to life. No beach balls at all. Very odd.

 

You could tcpdump to a file and then upload to here. Might be able to help a little more.

 

You could also possibly tail the logs while logged in using ssh. This also helps to see what is happening.

 

Very true. I just need to reinstall ARD as I formatted my 10.5 Macbook and installed a newly purchased copy of 10.6.3 at the Apple Store last weekend. All of our imaged clients have remote access enabled so SSH and ARD will work. I'm just not wanting to tie down an individual to a certain computer. So I'm going to hold off on creating a local user account.

 

I have one Macbook setup to our OD only with a test user account created in WGM and that still beach-balled so I can rule out the slow nature of SMB causing the hangs. I might transition them to a cylinder of destiny configuration though as I'm envisioning our Windows file servers getting their storage space sucked down to nothing with iMovie and iPhoto use. We can still map a drive/folder to their Windows Home, but I've not seen much cross platform use so it won't hurt our users much to have two homes. Plus the homes on the Xserve are populated correctly the first time versus me having to tell staff and students to create this folder or such and such application won't work on your Macbook

 

For the time being our contracted network engineers are going to add a SSID to our Cisco wireless controller that will patch straight into our VLAN 8 that the servers reside on. We'll also do the same for our wired iMacs as they seem to have the same issue. It's a dirty trick, but I'm going to test that for a few days and see what that nets us.

 

Thanks HodgeHI and to everyone else that has provided suggestions. I appreciate it.

[stevehp]

Little update on the situation here.

 

After moving a single cart to the new SSID our Macbooks at least OS wise are happily running for the most part. We still have some hiccups every now and then. The staff are still complaining of sluggish computers and it seems like it's mostly tied to Internet use (i.e. wiki creation, general browsing, etc.) . I tested a cart and true to their word Safari was dog slow at loading, animated images stuttered like crazy and it bogged down the rest of the OS as well. I turned off the DNS prefetching feature which did nothing. I also have cookies, and other caches redirected locally but I did turn that off to test and it made no difference. Anybody have any other ideas?

 

On a related note I installed Chrome on a few and it zipped along just fine, but for some reason or another some of the managed preferences I applied wouldn't work for instance the home page and start-up behavior.

Edited December 15, 2010 by stevehp

[HodgeHi]

Safari does tend to crawl along unless the caches folder has been redirected on login. You can make sure this is the case by checking in the users library folder. You should see an alias in there (should have a little black arrow in the bottom left corner of the icon).

 

Also redirect the Logs folder.

 

You could also update the flash plugin as this is perhaps the biggest bottleneck of all when browsing on a mac using safari.

 

Failing that it could be something to do with the top sites. I found this to be pretty sluggish when behind a browser and across a networked home dir. One thing to test is perhaps a local user to see if they have the issue. If not then it is definitely something to do with the networked accounts.

 

I haven't checked Chrome on mac for managed preference support. If you can add the plist file to the list in WGM then it you should be able to manage it. Just check the Once, often, Always settings. Some preferences will only work when set to often. You can copy the always settings and paste them into the often setting. It will ask to move them or something.