Binding Macs to Open Directory as opposed to an OD Server?

[Zoom7000]

In our current setup we have about 40 iMacs bound to an OD and our AD. We bind them to AD for login credential passing and to OD for Workgroup Manager settings and other bits and bobs including DeployStudio.

 

We recently had an issue where our Xserve had a hard disk failure. To keep everyone going I had a OSX Server VM running on my desk iMac not doing much. So, I set up everything on there and had to rebind the iMacs on to the new OD server for everyone to work again. Once we got the Xserve working again, we had to rebind the iMacs back to the Xserve.

 

To avoid the same situation happening again, I'd like to have 2 OSX Servers controlling our Open Directory "Domain" in case 1 or the other goes down, but not have to rebind all the iMacs from one OD server to the next. So I'd like to know if there is a way to bind the iMacs to the OD "Domain" as opposed to a single OD server.

[3s-gtech]

Not quite what you asked - but could you set your XServe up with RAID 5 to at least help with this, so hopefully the server can still operate with a disk down?

[Zoom7000]

Good point. But with the budget reading zero and the prospect of additional finances unlikely, I don't think we can afford to look at alternative RAID solutions and will kinda have to work with what we've got!

[HodgeHi]

Set up the additional OS X server as a replicated server. This will replicate all the information in the ldap DB and kerberos DB in case the OD master fails. If the OD master fails you just promote the replica server up to an OD master and continue. However, how this works with bound machines I'm not sure as I've never used this feature. We just backup the WGM groups and preferences.

 

Rebuilding an OS X server from scratch is pretty quick really. If you export all of the server preferences using server admin, once the os is installed reconfiguring the entire server is really just a few clicks. One of OS X servers better features