I work for a public school district. We have several hundred computers that authenticate to an Active Directory domain. The user's home folders are mapped to shares on a Windows server through AD group policies. Of these computers, about 50-60 of them are Macintosh Computers running OS X 10.4.11. The Macintosh clients also get managed desktop settings from an Open Directory Macintosh server.
The windows clients hardly ever have any difficulties logging in. The macintosh clients have frequent problems. A lot of the time when the computer is first booted up, any user who attempts to logon using a domain account will be "shaken off". Sometimes, If they keep trying, they'll eventually get in. Sometimes the student will fail at one computer and then try again from another computer and succeed. Sometimes, neither of those tricks work, but a reboot of the computers will work. Other times, instead of being shaken off, they'll get the message that their home directory is located on an AFP or SMB server and they are unable to login at this time. If they keep trying they may get in.
Occasionally a macintosh computer will get so bad that it will never allow anyone to logon at all using a domain account. If that happens we try unbinding and then rebinding the computer to the domain. That usually fixes the problem, for a few weeks or so, and then it happens again. On really rare occasions, unbinding and rebinding does not work and we are forced to format the computer and re-install or image it from scratch. We have been putting up with this for over a year now and it is time we get this resolved one way or the other.
We have also tried removing the Open Directory management of desktops from the equation by removing those settings in Directory Acess. That didn't help either.
The clients originally used DHCP for all their network settings (just like the windows clients) but we have even tried switching all the clients to static addressing. They all point to an internal DNS server. We have approximately 2500 users and 500 computers in the building. All the users are grouped into several different organizational units that have group policies assigned to that OU.
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